Books in the Council on Foreign Relations Books series

Winner of the 2010 Hayek Book Prize given by the Manhattan Institute"e;Money, Markets and Sovereignty is a surprisingly easy read, given the complicated issues covered. In it, Mr. Steil and Mr. Hinds consistently challenge today's statist nostrums."e;Doug Bandow, The Washington TimesIn this keenly argued book, Benn Steil and Manuel Hinds offer the most powerful defense of economic liberalism since F. A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom more than sixty years ago. The authors present a fascinating intellectual history of monetary nationalism from the ancient world to the present and explore why, in its modern incarnation, it represents the single greatest threat to globalization.Steil and Hinds describe the current state of international economic relations as both unusual and precarious. Eras of economic protectionism have historically coincided with monetary nationalism, while eras of liberal trade have been accompanied by a universal monetary standard. But today, the authors show, an unprecedentedly liberal global trade regime operates side by side with the most extreme doctrine of monetary nationalism ever contriveda situation bound to trigger periodic crises. Steil and Hinds call for a revival of the political and economic thinking that underlay earlier great periods of globalization, thinking that is increasingly under threat by more recent ideas about what sovereignty means.

A study of democratization, which proposes that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the years, is not just a series of exceptions. It examines the state of democracy in a variety of countries, why the middle class has turned against democracy in some cases, and whether the decline in global democratization is reversible.