Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In the face of a planet-wide takeover by untrammelled finance, voters have turned increasingly away from the political champions of the free market to those whose social democractic traditions might seem to offer some sense of protection and order. However, traditionally left-leaning parties now in power have directed their regulatory enthusiasm not at the giants of finance and industry, but at individual liberty and public morals.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface: The Age of Insecurity (p. vii)
• Preface to the Paperback Edition: The View from 1999 (p. ix)
• Introduction: Happy Christmas, War is Over (p. 1)
• Chapter 1 Right On: The Rise and Fall of Enterprise Culture (p. 15)
• Chapter 2 Cash is Fact or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Business (p. 56)
• Chapter 3 System Failure: The Free Market under Battle Conditions (p. 86)
• Chapter 4 A Longing Look Abroad (1): The British Left and the United States (p. 133)
• Chapter 5 A Longing Look Abroad (2): The British Left and the European Union (p. 158)
• Chapter 6 No Highway: The Left's Mystery Tour down Two Blind Alleys (p. 189)
• Chapter 7 Let's Hear It for Karl Marx: Inequality and Instability in the Market Order (p. 219)
• Chapter 8 The Big Alternative (p. 245)
• Chapter 9 The Age of Security (p. 293)
• Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Any Day Now: Beyond the Age of Insecurity (p. 295)
• Notes (p. 313)
• Index (p. 321)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

This visionary leftist critique of the "new world order" argues that notwithstanding the apparent triumph of big business values from the late 1970s to the present, the resulting free-market, globalized economic system is a failure, producing ever-increasing insecurity and marginalization for the average worker. Elliott, economics editor for the Guardian, and Atkinson, a Guardian reporter, forcefully document the extent to which the middle class has been ravaged by downsizing, vanishing career ladders, growing consolidation of economic power by large firms and low-paid, part-time or home-based work. In their assessment, both Clinton's Democratic centrism and Tony Blair's Labour Party program in Britain offer largely cosmetic reforms but leave essentially intact a laissez-faire capitalism that primarily serves the needs of multinational corporations and a privileged technocratic elite. Calling for a "green Keynesianism," the authors boldly advocate fairer distribution of income both within and between countries; reinvestment in community services; price controls on essential goods and services to benefit the poor at the expense of wealthier consumers; restraints on transnational capital flows; and development of technologies to heal environmental wounds. They weave in a freewheeling cultural history of postwar Britain. Despite the mostly British frame of reference, their study will engage American readers. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

At the heart of this book is a very important and controversial idea. The unregulated market contains important contradictions that make it an unstable foundation on which to build a global society. Perhaps we have gone too far in embracing the market. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the meaning of freedom and the importance of security versus wealth in human affairs. This important idea is presented and discussed in a very uneven fashion, however. Sometimes the authors, who edit and write for the British newspaper the Guardian, are almost scholarly in their analysis, while at other times the reader would think they were writing for the British tabloid The Sun. The result is not bad so much as it is frustrating. One wishes that the dangers of global markets were presented here as vividly as they were in William Greider's polemic One World, Ready or Not (1997), or that the case for the state were made as thoughtfully as in Will Hutton's The State We're In (London, 1995). In any case, a more consistent marriage of style and content would at least help one know who is the intended audience. Very few notes and no bibliography. Public library collections. M. Veseth; University of Puget Sound

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Larry Elliott is the Economics Editor for the Guardian (London).
Dan Atkinson is a reporter for the Guardian.