Central Bank Strategy, Credibility, and Independence: Theory and Evidence . By Alex Cukierman. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992. 496p. $50.00.

implementation tends to lead them away from general paradigms altogether. Colclough sets the tone in the introduction when he argues that one of the principal problems with the new political economy is its failure to acknowledge that "each country circumstance is specific, requiring particular analysis before detailed prognoses can be offered. " Robert Chambers is more aggressive, arguing for a "paradigm of reversals" that starts with the "dispersed, diverse and complicating" perspectives of poor rural people themselves (p. 276). While it is hard to gainsay the virtue of focusing on "field-level realities" (ibid.), an approach that hopes to replace neoliberalism's role as the theoretical undergirding for a full gamut of specific policies must itself present a clearly articulated set of general propositions with some claim to universal applicability. The absence of a successor to the aging "new political economy" is even more evident in the second of these collections, Moran and Wright's; but it suffers from a prior structural problem, as well. It originates in a lecture series commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the department of government at the University of Manchester. The scope of interests represented in the series, while a credit to the department, makes it hard for the volume to deliver a coherent argument. Contributions range from philosophical engagements with classical political economy (Geras on Smith's conception of property) to specific case studies of industrial regulation (Humphreys on broadcasting). The individual chapters are too short to allow the development of substantial research contributions. Some are quite successful as essays. (Paul Cammack's chapter on the Latin American state, for example, is a very nice synthetic overview of recent thinking.) But pulling an overall message out of the diversity is still a challenge. In terms of its contribution to the debate with neoliberalism, the high point of the volume is the editors' heroic synthesis in the concluding chapter. Though not quite convincing as a summary of the chapters that have come before, the effort is fascinating in the degree to which its main points parallel those of the Colclough and Manor volume. According to Moran and Wright, one of the central conclusions of the Manchester seminars was that "market exchange depends on state power" and "the 'freer' the economy, the more extensive and powerful the state has to be" (p. 243). Markets and states cannot be conceived as "opposed forms of social organization" but must be seen as symbiotically linked (p. 239). Taken as a whole, the Manchester lectures, like the Colclough and Manor articles, are clearly at odds with neoliberal efforts to make the contest between state allocation and market mechanisms the principal axis of analysis in political economy. Again like the Colclough and Manor articles, the Manchester lectures provide only vague clues as to what the theoretical and methodological building blocks of a successor approach should be. Peter Humphreys invokes "the new institutionalism" (pp. 200, 216); but having indicated his allegiance, he does not provide programmatic elaboration. Moran and Wright suggest that the market transactions and behavior of firms should be seen as political processes involving bargaining and struggle. Yet they do not take the next step of opening a debate with the contemporary institutional economists like Oliver Williamson, to say nothing of showing how they would improve on such formulations. Despite the failure of these collections to provide a plausible successor to neoliberalism, they do provide a few enticing hints as to what might be involved in such a project when it eventually does emerge. First of all, such a project will, in good Hegelian fashion, involve a synthetic incorporation of some of the elements of neoliberalism. The Colclough and Manor volume is clearest on this point because it engages neoliberalism most directly. Even the most critical authors take pains to point out that concepts like "rent seeking" must be permanently incorporated into the analysis of development even if neoliberalism's exaggerated claims as to its effects are rejected. At the same time, any successor will certainly be "institutionalist" in the sense of focusing on the consequences of historically robust patterns of social ties and interactions, crucially reinforced by norms and culture, both in and out of formal organizations. Giving this institutionalist side more elegance and bite will be the real trick.