I wish to thank Steven Vogel for his insightful and generous reading of my book. He nonetheless suggests some concerns and areas for further elaboration.
Vogel’s first concern relates to the challenges of disentangling the causal effects of ideas from variables such as institutions and political leadership. While policy outcomes are clearly shaped by multiple causal factors, I contend that broad patterns of change across policy and partisan domains are difficult to explain through institutional or actor-centered accounts alone, particularly at moments of institutional instability, when ideas come forcefully into play. By encouraging elites to frame new policy challenges in certain ways—such as the French view of the Great Recession as a demand crisis, as opposed to the German emphasis on strategic sectors—national liberalisms help frame distinctive menus of policy options—in this case, varying patterns of fiscal policy. For this reason, simple recourse to “Keynesianism” or other predefined policy paradigms is insufficient; it turns out that Keynesianism means different things in different contexts.
Vogel’s second, related concern involves the challenges associated with connecting particular thinkers to broader traditions and demonstrating that these frameworks influence policy trajectories. This is a valid concern, which is why I do not ascribe independent causal force to individual thinkers, but rather work to identify broad thematic patterns that have informed elite decision making over time. In some cases, such as the influence of Müller-Armack on the German social market economy, such effects were quite explicit; in others, such as the influence of the ideas of Saint-Simon and Guizot on French planning, it was more diffuse. Moreover, in all such cases, national liberalisms evolve in dialogue with other traditions, as I emphasize throughout the book. The same could be said for the EU, as European institutions and related strictures on fiscal policy offer merely one among a number of competing frameworks that inform national policy responses. In all such cases, I argue, the effects of leadership and institutions are more indeterminate and subject to interpretive processes than many institutionalist scholars acknowledge.
Finally, Vogel suggests that my view of conventional conceptions of liberalism and neoliberalism as defined more by what they oppose than what they endorse lies in some tension with prevailing understandings of liberal markets as “institutional voids defined by what they are not.” This observation actually seems quite consistent with my view of market liberalism, but my more important point is that such partial-equilibrium models provide little guidance for understanding how policymakers mediate trade-offs among competing interests or devise substantive responses to moments of uncertainty. In this respect, my argument parallels Vogel’s own emphasis on “market governance,” as opposed to negative agendas such as “privatization” and “deregulation.” I merely suggest that attention to national liberalisms helps explain why elites select particular strategies of market governance.
It is in this spirit that my claim that ideas often precede institutions, which Vogel singles out with some skepticism, should be understood: not as a generalized philosophical proposition, but rather as a partial explanation for the contours of the national models of capitalism to which historical-institutionalist scholars have traditionally attributed such causal weight. These models were not devised arbitrarily, but rather emerged from shared understandings of state and society that long predated the war. Equally, these understandings have continued to shape the models’ evolution—as both institutionalized distributions of authority and understandings of its exercise—in the decades that followed.
