Yet this is largely belied by his account of its actual trajectory.

Lessons learnt and the demands of sacrificing masses forced advanced capitalism after the War into a golden age of reform and relative equality, regulated by cooperating nation-states under the benign hegemony of the US and by the framework of the Bretton Woods system.

Neo-Keynesian success brought its own downfall in over-accumulation, over-production, and sundry other dislocations: OPEC price hikes in oil, stagflation, the beginnings of financialization, the transfer of production to low-wage areas, the end of social compromise and the appearance of the disastrous, neoliberal solution of market fundamentalism that would reach its peak in the 1980s and 90s.

Neo-Keynesian success brought its own downfall in over-accumulation, over-production, and sundry other dislocations: OPEC price hikes in oil, stagflation, the beginnings of financialization, the transfer of production to low-wage areas, the end of social compromise and the appearance of the disastrous, neoliberal solution of market fundamentalism that would reach its peak in the 1980s and 90s.

He disregards the important German Ordoliberalen, but the attack on neoliberalism is well taken.

it needs actively to be tamed, regulated and modified and for that to happen there has to be struggle and countervailing forces, above all a vigorous lib-lab and union presence

an ideological product of irrational neoliberalism and the obverse fatigue of the neo-Keynesians

Mann challenges world-systems theorists on the issue of decline: the recession of the 1970s, it turns out, was an opportunity for the US to delay the crisis for several decades, permitting it to profit extensively from its seigneurial position

‘Revolutions are rarely a good idea’, as he typically puts it in bluff style. They tend to comport lots of ideology, in a bad sense.

Most Americans had, to be sure, a shallow grasp of foreign realities and were prone to a fearful anti-communism—a case of Durkheimian ideological excess, perhaps.