Buy new:
$15.99$15.99
Delivery Tuesday, April 23
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $6.88
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? Paperback – September 27, 2011
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Publishing Group
- Publication dateSeptember 27, 2011
- Dimensions8.43 x 5.51 x 0.55 inches
- ISBN-109781591844402
- ISBN-13978-1591844402
Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought

The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – and Our Response – Will Change the WorldHardcover$16.25 shippingGet it as soon as Tuesday, Apr 23Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Every Nation for Itself: What Happens When No One Leads the WorldPaperback$15.23 shippingOnly 3 left in stock (more on the way).
The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge in an Uncertain World (with a New Preface)Paperback$15.81 shippingGet it as soon as Tuesday, Apr 23Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the WorldPaperback$15.35 shippingGet it as soon as Tuesday, Apr 23Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Editorial Reviews
Review
-David Brooks, New York Times
"Mr. Bremmer... provides a wide-ranging account of the rise of state capitalism and he litters his prose with apposite examples and acute insights. Nobody with a serious interest in the current dilemma should pass it by."
-The Economist
"Brilliant and indispensible. One of the preeminent political analysts of our time with the must-read book for how politics and global markets are converging at our peril."
-Nouriel Roubini, Chairman of Roubini Global Economics
"From the stories of deadly rioting at a Chinese factory to the Russian prime minister's grocery shopping to the construction site of an entirely new Saudi city, this is a fascinating story with a timely and important message: American- style free-market democracy might not be the wave of the future."
- Fareed Zakaria, editor, Newsweek International; author of The Post- American World
"The End of the Free Market is both fresh and provocative. It illuminates the subtle, yet powerful, geopolitical and economic undercurrents that must be understood by all of us."
- Greg Brown, CEO of Motorola
"Ian Bremmer's understanding of international commerce and politics is peerless. The End of the Free Market holds essential insights for anyone conducting business on the global level."
- Sallie Krawcheck, President, global wealth and investment management, Bank of America
"A powerful analysis of the new emerging world order by an author who is always full of insights."
- George Osborne, MP, shadow chancellor of the Exchequer
"Ian Bremmer's book couldn't have come at a better time. An essential guide to the future of the world economy, The End of the Free Market describes the coming war for the soul of capitalism. It offers useful insights for investors, business leaders, and anyone interested in how to survive this coming global confrontation."
- David Smick, Global policy strategist and author of The World Is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 1591844401
- Publisher : Penguin Publishing Group (September 27, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781591844402
- ISBN-13 : 978-1591844402
- Item Weight : 10.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 8.43 x 5.51 x 0.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,893,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #938 in Government Management
- #1,701 in International Economics (Books)
- #2,979 in Economic Conditions (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm.
In 1998, Bremmer established Eurasia Group with just $25,000. At present, the company is the leading global political risk research and consulting firm, with offices in New York, Washington, and London, as well as a network of experts and resources in 90 countries. Eurasia Group provides analysis and expertise about how political developments and national security dynamics move markets and shape investment environments across the globe.
Bremmer created Wall Street's first global political risk index (GPRI). He is the founding chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk and is an active public speaker. He has authored several books including the national bestsellers Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World and The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? Bremmer is a contributor to the Financial Times A-List and Reuters.com. He has written hundreds of articles for publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, and Foreign Affairs. He appears regularly on CNBC, Fox News Channel, Bloomberg Television, National Public Radio, the BBC, and other networks.
Bremmer earned a PhD in political science from Stanford University in 1994 and was the youngest-ever national fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a global research professor at New York University and has held faculty positions at Columbia University, the EastWest Institute, and the World Policy Institute. In 2007, Bremmer was named a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. His analysis focuses on global macro political trends and emerging markets, which he defines as "those countries where politics matter at least as much as economics for market outcomes."
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Bremmer grounds his opening argument in the debate about Fukuyama's End of History ideas. Contrary to popular opinion at the time, he claims that only one of the three predictions made by proponents of globalism like Fukuyama came true; communism would die, dictatorships would be replaced by democracies, and nation-states would become obsolete. Only communism died. He counters that although principles of liberal democracy such as elections have been adopted around the world, they are hardly fair or even democratic. New means of communication through the internet, instead of being subversive have been co-opted by the state propaganda network to strengthen authoritarian regimes. Massive companies with GDPs bigger than most countries were seen as another indicator of obsolete nation-states in the face of globalism, but have been hard-pressed to compete with state-run or state-favored companies. The failure of communism convinced many people that state-directed economies could not produce prosperity. Indeed, the massive trade growth, tariff reductions, and business expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union seemed to prove this. However, the recent arrival of multiple large companies from BRIC countries, usually state-controlled oil and gas like Gazprom and Petro China have contradicted this popular idea. Bremmer even points to the massive bailouts from both the United States and European countries for their own economies as proof that worldwide governments are controlling more of their economies.
Exploring the roots of state capitalism, Bremmer identifies a historical connection to mercantilism. He defines the United States and Western Europe as "mixed" capitalist economies, they manage common goods like education, welfare, and national defense, but are reliant on the market to generate both prosperity and ideas. In state capitalism, the idea of common goods extends to state-sanctioned companies and resources, but Bremmer insists that state capitalism is not simply "repackaged communism." Instead, he defines it as "a form of bureaucratically engineered capitalism particular to each government that practices it. It's a system in which the state dominates markets primarily for political gain." With a few reservations, Bremmer prefers to compare state capitalism to mercantilism which he calls "economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful state." Like mercantilist states, they actively sought access or markets to resources and were obsessed with a positive trade surplus. Using China as an example, during the recession it curbed imports by subsidizing the manufacturing industry and hoarding foreign currencies to regulate the yuan. He is careful to clarify the many differences between the two systems, namely the false assumptions of finite wealth and fixed economies, though an argument could be made about the growing scarcity of natural resources. Because government behavior often uses a combination of free market and state capitalism to achieve their ends, Bremer insists that labeling countries state capitalist or free-market is problematic. He uses a scale to determine that countries like the United States and Japan are mostly free-market, but have recently been pushed left by the recession. Overall, he concludes that most countries have shifted towards free market capitalism in the last 20 years. In identifying state capitalists, he points to China and Russia as the most important examples or the reason "why we talk about state capitalism" but also goes into great detail discussing many countries who have adopted degrees of state capitalism. He identifies four distinctive elements in the state capitalist model; national oil companies, state-owned enterprises, privately-owned national companies, and sovereign wealth funds. For each of the countries listed in his book, he explores to what degree these countries use "oil, gas, and other commodities as political tools and strategic assets," or resource nationalism.
Overall, Bremmer sees the threat of state capitalism being overcome by the forces of free market capitalism. Unlike other pundits who worry that foreign countries like China and Russia can threaten the United States by calling in all their debts, Bremmer insists that a more likely scenario would be a refusal to extend further credit to the U.S. government. The recession also hurt the cause of free markets by convincing many state capitalist leaders that connections to the free market were hazardous. Furthermore, the recession showed that the G8 was not representational and that the G20 was too big to build consensus. Nevertheless, Bremmer insists that creative destruction can fuel future growth and that governments do occasionally relinquish control. He claims that state capitalist governments are fundamentally unstable and inefficient because they lack popular appeal and allocate resources based on what pleases the public rather than helps the economy. He dismisses any substantial military threat to U.S. power, but focuses on global shortages of key resources due to inefficient administration and an emphasis on growth. These governments also offer no-strings attached aid to repressive governments in order to secure resource concessions, but have difficulty aligning other interests because they lack a unifying ideology. He encourages the United States to continue investing in a strong military because as a public good it reduces arms races and escalating conflicts. He also advocates Americans to resist the urge to ban foreign investment or immigration and instead "Buy Chinese." He insists that China has explosive economic potential and by deepening ties with China, the United State not only benefits financially but could also apply gradual pressure to reform their markets and ensure that any politically motivated Chinese maneuver would be insured by a policy of "mutually assured economic destruction."
The End of the Free Market offers a coherent and succinct analysis of the current political dynamic. Bremmer is one of the first scholars to adequately treat the effects of the recession on geopolitics. He also offers compelling criticism of the state capitalist model and its profoundly short-sighted political potential versus the productive potential of a free market system. However, in retrospect some of his criticisms of state capitalism do not sound so critical. With good reason, he repeatedly claims that state capitalism is inherently inefficient, yet the Chinese economy continues to grow at 10% a year. Additionally, his discussion on sovereign wealth funds does a better job of selling the policy than repudiating it. His characterization of new means of communication being used by the government to control populations does not also consider the revolutionary impact that these new forms of communication have on government resistance. The recent events of the Arab Spring demonstrate just how powerful social media, smart phones, and the internet have been to protesters. If anything, several governments in the Middle East tried limiting internet access to prevent further protests.
Bremmer is hardly the first to make such an observation. Indeed, the story he tells is for the most part one familiar, at least in parts, to anyone who picks up a newspaper. He focuses on the remarkable transformation in economic fortunes China has managed without great alterations in political system. This state capitalism, he argues, is not confined to China, and indeed looks likely to spread following the chaos of the Great Recession and its apparent discrediting of Western free market capitalism. However, state capitalism is not an ideological movement like communism, fascism, or even free market democracy. The states that practice it are as diverse as the United Arab Emirates, South Africa, China, and Russia, and they do so in markedly different ways, to different degrees, and with different governing ideologies. What they all share is a commitment to preserving political stability, and a conviction that the key to doing so is the calculated use of free-market tools.
No, what distinguishes The End of the Free Market is not the novelty of its narrative. Rather, Bremmer's work is elevated above its often commonplace assertions by the clarity, confidence, and efficiency with which it is told. Bremmer has a knack for eloquently summarizing major economic and political trends in a remarkably short space; late in the book, for example, he encapsulates in an eight-line aside the reasoning behind modern economist's assertion that markets, not foreign aid, are the key to raising living standards in the developing world. This skill is equally evident on subjects that lie closer to his subject matter: A particularly strong instance is pages 135-136, in which he describes why Chinese national oil companies represent such a serious threat to any attempt by the West to punish tyrannical but oil-rich regimes. And while at times the rapid-fire introduction of new information can be dizzying, the sort of pithy analysis described above makes The End of the Free Market an excellent and compact analysis of the shifting and various realities of global politics.
What it is not, however, is an especially strong policy manual. While Bremmer has a central theme, and he focuses on that theme with an admirable intensity, he is reluctant to go further and graduate a theme into a thesis. It is often unclear, for example, whether state capitalism really represents a threat to true free-market capitalism. On the one hand, he at times argues that state capitalism, like socialism, communism, and fascism, will inevitably collapse in the face of the superior efficiency and innovation that truly free markets deliver. But if free markets have such inherent superiority, why is it necessary that free market defenders such as the United States and the European Union preach its gospel as aggressively as he counsels? Elsewhere, Bremmer has made it clear that he thinks state capitalism can be beneficial only in countries which are highly underdeveloped relative to their true potential, at which point its weaknesses will become clear; one wishes he had been similarly clear here (see "Planet Money Deep Read: Ian Bremmer," the June 2, 2010 episode of the excellent Planet Money economics podcast). And while few economists would argue with his conclusion that free market economies must guard carefully against protectionism, a policymaker might wonder what exactly, beyond keeping trade barriers low and talking up the virtues of a liberal economy, Bremmer would ask them to do.
Not only does The End of the Free Market lack serious policy prescriptions for the advanced economies, it is also missing an economic theory for the developing world. While he clearly believes that freer markets do more to lift people out of poverty and spur innovation and investment, Bremmer is not clear how one might introduce such an economic system into a country lacking transparent and effective government institutions and a history of free markets. If the Western mixed economy is superior, why is it that countries which have attempted to import it whole-cloth (Russia and South Africa in the 1990s, for instance) have faltered even as politically managed state capitalist countries have thrived (China since the 1970s, Russia since the 2000s)? These are failures Bremmer acknowledges, but does not fully explain. And while the challenges are indeed large (creating the institutions and mores upon which liberalism depends is notoriously time-consuming and difficult), it is difficult to see why anyone seeking to guide an economy through liberalization would choose Western, market-based democracy over Chinese, market-exploiting stable autocracy.
And yet, despite its lack of clear policy solutions and occasionally derivative character, The End of the Free Market is well worth reading. In particular, Bremmer makes a strong case that the broad geopolitical theories of the 1990s and early 2000s are well and truly dead. We are not entering the End of History predicted by Francis Fukuyama in which liberal democracy is the only ideology left standing; nor Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations between allied cultural and religious powers; and though Thomas Friedman is right that The World is Flat, he is wrong to conclude that this means cross-border ties will soon trump the nation state.
Rather, Bremmer draws on the insights of these and other theorists to posit that, while we are indeed leaving an era of overt hostility between states, we are entering a new era of a long economic struggle between those who truly believe in free markets, and those who merely utilize them. He is right to point out that, if genuinely free market states give in to the temptations of state capitalism, we will witness a startling decline in our ability innovate our way out of our increasingly complex environmental and economic problems. That he does so in a way that his work shines a light on the linkages and similarities among such economically and politically diverse states as China, Mexico, and India, and prepares the reader for the most economically important trend of the next decade, makes The End of the Free Market look not only interesting but vital.
Top reviews from other countries
Bremmers Argumente sind weithin bekannt (und können woanders nachgelesen werden). Er entwirft eine eigene Art von Staatskapitalismus. Ich finde diese aber wenig revolutionär oder neu - gerade für die "Musterregionen", die er nennt (Russland, Saudi-Arabien, China) gibt es länderspezifisch einige andere Autoren, die die jeweiligen Wirtschaftsformen mit dem Zusammenspiel von Staat und Wirtschaft anders und differenzierter beschreiben, als Bremmer es tut. Mit anderen Worten: Bremmers Argumente werden von ihm über einen Kamm geschoren und somit extrem reduziert, damit seine Grundaussage für alle von ihm identifizierten Länder zutreffend ist.
Das Problem dabei ist jedoch, dass mit dem Anspruch auch Frankreich (oder auch Deutschland) ein staatskapitalistisches Land sein kann. Nur das bestreitet Bremmer. Im Endeffekt bleibt also nur die wenig neue Erkenntnis bzw. Hypothese, dass die aufstrebenden Länder weiterhin eine Gefahr für "den Westen" darstellen und dieser sich daher anpassen soll.
Sein Schreibstil ist klar, aber seine Argumente wiederholen sich zu oft. Der Aufbau im Buch ist daher etwas verwirrend, die Fallbeispiele tragen zu spät zur Klarheit seiner Argumentation bei. Das ist auch in der deutschen Ausgabe nicht anders (z. B. über die bpb zu erhalten).


