Martin Wolf, the influential economic correspondent of Financial Times, concludes his book Why Globalization Works (2004): “What the successful countries all share is a move towards the market economy, one in which private property rights, free enterprise and competition increasingly took the place of state ownership, planning and protection. They chose, however haltingly, the path of economic liberalization and international integration. This is the heart of the matter. All else is commentary” (pp. 143–44).

Wolf echoes the orthodoxy of our age, though he presents it as an embattled minority view in danger of being swamped by “the enemies mustering both outside and inside the gates” (p. 4), also known as the “anti-globalists.” The large majority of professional and academic economists working in North America and Europe would broadly agree with him, as would a majority in the international relations subdiscipline of international political economy (IPE). The difference between them and Wolf is readability. Wolf writes in plain English. The academics use the methodology of formalization to polish the surface until icily dull, and practice an almost rancorous rejection of interpretive theory, springy narrative, or adventitious insight.

William Tabb's book is different. It takes a jaundiced view of the claims of liberal globalists—claims that the worldwide shift toward liberal market economies since the 1980s has brought faster growth, less poverty, more income equality, and more stable societies. It goes on to take a jaundiced view of the governance of our present global state economic governance institutions (GSEGIs), seeing them as dominated by a tiny group of states that negotiate international rules and regimes among themselves and then present these “club” goods to other states to sign onto. The other states are then often faced with the “mugee's choice”: Sign up in the interests of “preserving collegiality” or face dire penalties, such as exposure to the whims of the U.S. Congress in granting access to the U.S. market.

Tabb makes extended use of the analogy with “merchant law” of medieval and early modern times (lex mercatoria). This body of “soft law” provided for nonstate arbitration for transnational business disputes where private contract practices differed from one community or state to another; it was formulated and enforced by the cross-border business community itself. It thus operated outside the norms of each territorial community or state, and was not subject to accountability from that source.

Tabb argues that since World War II, international rules have increasingly supplanted national rules and standards in many economic domains of application (a new merchant law). Those international rules themselves are formed in a “club” process dominated by the United States—its government, its courts, its firms, its scientific bodies, its nongovernmental organizations. The United States has used its preeminent position to push for free trade and free capital mobility and for standards of international law derived from its own national law.

When markets had borders that corresponded roughly with the borders of political units, citizens could collectively regulate market competition to ensure that it advanced a notion of the common good formulated through a political process. With free trade and free capital mobility, however, politically determined limits on market competition are far more difficult to exert. Preferences for an egalitarian capitalism, a universal Sweden, never get expressed because the world lacks the institutions through which such a collective choice could be made. Instead, free trade and free capital mobility tilt the world willy-nilly in the direction of U.S.-style inegalitarian capitalism and noncorporatist democracy.

Tabb argues that the GSEGIs—notably the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (which he examines at length)—are the spearhead of this universalizing of liberal economic rules; and he shows how they constitute a nascent international state for which previous notions of sovereignty, accountability, and equity miss the point. He has good case studies of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, debt relief, and the halting counterhegemonic formation of an East Asian economic zone.

In terms of readability, the book is along toward the Wolf end of the spectrum (though Columbia University Press deserves no credit for its copyediting—too many typos and mispunctuations). It is up-to-date, with plenty of material on the foreign economic and political policies of the George W. Bush presidency, a subject on which Tabb delivers some of his punchiest lines. Each chapter is headed by choice epigraphs, a bonanza for examiners looking for “Discuss” questions. The book is also unusually well informed about the academic literature across economics, IR, IPE, and security studies, bringing insights from all or several of these disciplines to bear on the subject at hand. On the other hand, the book contains not a single table or graph. And it lacks a coherent theory of capital accumulation and class formation, which might have supplied an inner dynamic behind the processes of governance that it interestingly discusses. On a profundity scale, it certainly goes deeper than most of the surfacy IPE literature, but it could have gone further to the core.

Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization is to be recommended for courses in IPE and IR-with-an-economic-accent, for Masters and Ph.D. students, and for upper-level undergraduates of hard-working disposition. It makes a good counterbalance to more standard texts, especially for looking at U.S. actions through less rose-tinted spectacles, without descending to the polemics of Wolf's anti-globalists.