Journal of Law and Political Economy

This review essay engages with various conceptualizations of the “capitalist state” and “state capitalism” within four newly published books. It posits that the capitalist state is not a homogeneous category—that the “mature independence of the economic sphere from the political sphere” in liberal capitalism and their “immature independence” in state capitalism render the role of the state in each geography different while producing distinct geopolitical structures within the global economic order. The essay argues that the extraterritorial liberal capitalism of the Anglo-Saxon sphere has historically produced and simultaneously peripheralized state capitalism outside this sphere. State capitalism has, in turn, posed threats to free competition and profitability rates of liberal capitalism, requiring intervention by the hegemonic power arising from liberal capitalism to tackle market distortion. As such, debates around the “return of geopolitics” to international law should be nuanced within the structural tendencies of the two forms of capitalism.