In this impressive biography of the city's three-time mayor, Ed Koch, Jonathan Soffer argues that New York's neoliberal transformation began two decades before Giuliani and Bloomberg occupied city hall. Between 1978 and 1989, Koch – a Democrat who had benefited from the New Deal order – presided over the transformation of New York into a city safe for capital without ever abandoning a faith in the liberalism of his youth. Winning office in a metropolis still reeling from the financial crisis of the mid-1970s, he continued the shock therapy of his predecessor Abraham Beame, despite the savage costs of austerity.

Koch emerges in Soffer's account as a bridge between two worlds of liberalism. His capacity to piece together electoral coalitions through the courting of Jewish, Catholic and white liberal constituencies might have been reminiscent of an old school boss, but he understood the power of mass media, and proved a master of manipulating TV and press coverage. He shared conservatives’ talent for mobilizing white ethnic resentment against crime, welfare and affirmative action, yet quietly supported socially progressive policies on gay rights and abortion. And he reconciled his Rooseveltian liberalism with the realization that New York's fiscal emergency required a different regime: tellingly, Rupert Murdoch was the most prominent supporter of his first successful mayoral bid, though this may have owed more to the Australian mogul's desire to back a winner than any ideological affinity. In this regard, Soffer presents Koch as a bridge between two regimes: a mayor who modelled himself on Fiorello La Guardia while anticipating Giuliani, Bloomberg and the Democratic neoliberal creed of Bill Clinton.

Soffer's account is as balanced as a Koch budget. The late mayor is thanked in the acknowledgments, and the debt of gratitude is fully redeemed in an account which neither sanctifies nor smears its subject. Scrupulously fair, Soffer chides Koch for his relations with New York's African-American citizens, while offering a measured defence of his belated response to the AIDS crisis. The careful weighing of Koch's record continues throughout, with Soffer reserving especial praise for the mayor's handling of the city's finances, which opened opportunities for public investment, albeit more often in the name of ‘economic development’ (p. 295) than social need. Whether such investment was enough, though, was questionable, for while austerity placated the bond markets, it left the municipal government bereft of the resources needed to run a city of New York's size. The risk of ‘physical collapse’ (p. 399) was a side effect of New York's fiscal medicine.

Whether such tonic was necessary is a question that runs through Soffer's study. ‘No mayor could solve the larger problems caused by the longer national trends that hurt cities’, the author argues plausibly in the introduction (p. 3), but if Koch did ‘put New York on the road toward a precarious revival’, did he have to do so by giving away so much? The portrait Soffer paints of New York in the late 1970s suggests the answer was probably yes. Like Detroit today, parts of the city lay in ruin, and the book does a fine job of evoking the severity of the urban crisis. Filmmakers even used burnt-out portions of the Bronx as a surrogate for World War II Dresden. Volatile markets and white flight – the former, a consequence of shifts in global economic power; the latter, a process abetted by Federal policy – could not be ignored. Something had to be done. But unlike Detroit, New York was a world city with a diverse economic base, and while Koch doubtless stimulated private investment in business and real estate through policies his successors would extend, the persistence of programmes like rent control suggests that an affluent and globally connected bourgeoisie can co-exist with social democracy in one city. Could Koch then have defended more or even pushed for more radical alternatives? It would be interesting to see whether the Occupy movement and the populism of Mayor Bill Di Blasio have changed Soffer's assessment of Koch's city hall.

It is refreshing to read a history of neoliberalism in which an individual takes centre stage. Too often, perhaps, abstractions acquire an agency of their own. Yet, Soffer's account portrays a mayor more often at the mercy of events than their master. If markets were not restraining Koch's room for manoeuvre then the Federal government was, and while the mayor might have won small victories in the likes of housing policy, he had little hope of halting the nation's rightward drift. It is hard not to conclude that in arbitrating the competing claims of New Deal liberalism and its neoliberal heir, he saw the latter gain more, though Soffer indicates this was far from the mayor's fault. Koch is certainly a compelling character – something the makers of The People's Court (a Judge Judy-style show) realized when they appointed him to the TV bench. But what emerges from this fascinating study is a picture of a man doing his best to channel forces that he – and the city he led – had little capacity to control.