Colin Crouch

Globalisation, heralded for decades as a harbinger of prosperity, faces a huge backlash. Derided by right-wing nationalists as a ‘globalist’ plot to undermine traditional communities, and by left-wing critics as the rule of rampaging corporations, it has become a political punching bag around the world. In this incisive book, leading commentator Colin Crouch defends globalisation against its critics to the...

Increasingly, employees are being falsely treated as ‘self-employed’. This phenomenon – the gig economy – is seen as the inevitable shape of things to come. In this book, Colin Crouch takes a step back and questions this logic. He shows how the idea of an employee – a stable status that involves a bundle of rights – has maintained a...

Capitalism is the only complex system known to us that can provide an efficient and innovative economy, but the financial crisis has brought out the pernicious side of capitalism and shown that it remains dependent on the state to rescue it from its own deficiencies. Can capitalism be reshaped so that it is fit for society, or must we acquiesce...

In principle, the advanced, market-driven world in which we now live is fuelled by knowledge, information, and transparency. However, in practice, the processes that produce this world systematically corrupt and denigrate knowledge. This is the powerful and provocative argument advanced by Colin Crouch in his latest exploration of societies on the road to post-democracy. Crouch shows that executives in profit-maximizing...

Colin Crouch argues that at the base of all political conflicts are struggles over which types of people should be included in and which excluded from various rights, including the right to exist at all within a particular society. This is more fundamental than any conflict between left and right or between classes, and it gives rise to tropes of...

In Post-Democracy (Polity, 2004), Colin Crouch argued that behind the façade of strong institutions, democracy in many advanced societies was being hollowed out, its big events becoming empty rituals as power passed increasingly to circles of wealthy business elites and an ever-more isolated political class. Crouch’s provocative argument has in many ways been vindicated by recent events, but these have...