Introduction

The chapters in this book celebrate the enduring vitality of a comparative political economy approach that is empirically grounded and based on an undogmatic and critical engagement with Marxist theory in which agency, nonclass institutions and structures and struggles expressed through them play roles in capitalist transformation alongside class formation and class structure. The approach is historical, comparative and interdisciplinary. It is also one that assumes that the macro context is important for understanding the micro level and vice versa. Most of the chapters in this collection are based on these ideas, or some variant of them, though not all use the language of capital and class.