The Stratified State: Radical Institutionalist Theories of Participation and Duality.

• Author: Schaniel, William C.

The death of "Old" Institutional Economics has been proclaimed a multitude of times over the past two decades, with the school of thought designation being taken by a group of economists who call their work "New" Institutional Economics. This collection of essays stands in contradiction to those pronouncements, and show the vitality of discourse of a new generation of "old" institutional economists. The "Radical Institutionalist" designation used in the subtitle of the book reflects the conscious continuation of the progressive and activist line of "Old" Institutional Economics. In the essays the authors consciously trace their intellectual heritage through Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl Polanyi, and build on the works of recent Institutionalists such as Marc Tool, Louis Junket, Anne Mayhew, Walter C. Neale, Wendell Gordon and Allan Gruchy - what some now refer to as "Old" Institutional Economics. The "New" Institutional Economics of Oliver Williamson, Douglass North and Fredrik Barth - rational choice based on transaction costs - is specifically rejected. Those seeking to explore the issues involving state and the economy, feminist or family economics, or some of the recent issues in "Old" Institutional Economics, this book provides some interesting reading.

The strongest element of this collection is the range of ideas and issues discussed, which is not immediately evident by a perusal of the essay titles. The book is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the building of the theoretical foundations of state and economy interrelations, and a second set considers specific issues of state and livelihood. Each of the essays in the first section provides a different working definition of state, potentially creating an inconsistent multiplicity of definitions. The "'Stateness' as a Continuum" that is developed by William M. Dugger in "An Evolutionary Theory of State and Market" is widely divergent from J. Ron Stanfield's discussion of state from an ethnographic perspective in "Radical Institutionalism: The Theory of State," and Ann Jennings' historical/anthropological approach to developing a definition of state. Two essays, though, give order to the different definitions. The first is Douglass Brown's essay, which outlines a model of "State as a Terrain for the Conflict of Rights" in his opening essay "The Capitalist State as a Terrain of Rights." His formulation of state is a broad and flexible definitional model...