Politics and Markets : The World's Political Economic Systems

This thoughtful analysis of global politics must have been a good read in 1977 when it was published, but it is badly outdated now. The author presents a set of loose theories which contrast market-oriented polyarchies to plan-oriented communist systems. Then he discusses politics in China, the USSR, Yugoslavia, western European countries and the USA. But he is not writing political history, and his theories are not sufficiently general to be of timeless interest. In other words this book contains too few details to be an informative political history of the 1970’s, and its theories are much too specific to their own time to be worth reading 40 years later. I would recommend any other book by this author before this one.