Having lately demonstrated its capacity to be socially destructive, there is an increasing sense that capitalism could use some governance. Laurent Warlouzet’s book asks “Which form of capitalist governance best fosters peace, prosperity, social cohesion, and environmental protection?” (p. 1) and proceeds to address that question by examining the history of European integration since 1945. The book is animated by the sense that the past decade or two have seen rapid shifts between different answers, from a prevailing neoliberalism before 2015, to a more socially and environmentally friendly agenda, to protectionism and nationalism, so the range of options is currently open and there is no consensus around a particular approach.

Warlouzet begins by setting out three ideal types of capitalist governance, all contained in his title. By “liberty,” he means something close to laissez-faire, with a policy preference for free trade and markets as solutions to social problems. “Solidarity” corresponds to welfare states and redistribution, while “community,” somewhat surprisingly, refers to nationalism, authoritarianism, and protectionism. Warlouzet acknowledges that each of these approaches contains a range of extremes, each polity attempts to balance all three, and each specific policy issue represents the outcome of conflict and compromise between them, but his hope by using three concepts is to break apart the stale binary of free markets versus state intervention.

The bulk of the book is a detailed analysis of different issues in the history of European integration. Europe offers an ideal laboratory, Warlouzet argues, because “European integration represents a new and unique development in contemporary history. Never before have nation-states, including some of the world’s most powerful, chosen to voluntarily pool their sovereignty in connection with the management of capitalism, involving key areas such as border control and their currencies” (p. 6). Moreover, just as Europe helps test the “trinity” of approaches, so too do those three ideal types reveal things about Europe, because the book “argu[es] that the European institutional system, while being easier to combine with the liberty aspect of capitalism, is also compatible with moderate forms of solidarity and community capitalism” (p. 44, emphasis in original). After all, “European integration began and largely revolved around establishing a regulated market” (p. 75).

Warlouzet is a Professor of European History at Paris Sorbonne University and has been working on this subject for two decades, so the book reads like the confident synthesis of an expert. Indeed, anyone conversant in the history of postwar Western Europe will find much here that is familiar, and there is nothing revisionist in the broad strokes of the narrative. However, the central chapters are a terrific performance of clarity and compression: Warlouzet covers many of the core topics (the European Steel and Coal Community, the Common Agricultural Policy, the monetary union, the European Court of Justice) and many less familiar ones (aluminum mergers, neoliberal football, internet antitrust) while moving chronologically forward in time to the present, including COVID-era redistribution and the Russia–Ukraine war. He distinguishes four phases of European integration and their relation to the governance of capitalism: embedded liberalism in the immediate postwar moment, a global mixed capitalism, a phase of high neoliberalism after the 1980s, and a return of community capitalism in recent years. Warlouzet has drawn on an impressive array of archival sources and interviews, thereby refreshing even heavily discussed topics. This book will serve as a valuable reference text for anyone working on or learning about European integration and who needs a one-volume explanation of issues big and small that moves at high velocity while preserving essential details.

That said, the analytical framework does not always shed much light on the evidentiary chapters. The “liberty, community, solidarity” trinity often disappears for long stretches of the book, only to emerge at the beginning or end of sections to underline the way that some issue was a mix of all three approaches. In this way, we find that the Common Market (a liberty approach) was paired with national redistributive mechanisms (a solidarity approach, with a bit of community thrown in). Or that the monetary union contained all three, despite being associated with free markets. Or that, during the high neoliberal era, “The European Community launched three oft-forgotten projects combining liberal, solidarity, and community capitalism: the control of multinationals, industrial policy in ailing sectors, and ‘European preference.’ They for the most part failed, with Europe ultimately emerging only as a ‘normative power’” (p. 127, emphasis in original).

All of this seems true, but not something newly revealed by Warlouzet’s three ideal types. In part, that’s because ideal types never exist in their pure form in the real world, so of course each historical case is a combination of more than one. But it also isn’t new to find that even free-market neoliberals can also be xenophobic nationalists, or that egalitarian redistributionists can be protectionists, or even that free trade can coexist with ideas of solidaristic welfare states. Anyone who believed in a simple markets versus states binary should certainly be disabused of that notion, but I doubt if many readers conversant in the history of postwar Europe thought that way, and Warlouzet doesn’t provide a clear demonstration that this wrong view was so prevalent in the literature that it needed to be exploded. This point holds especially for “community capitalism,” which he presents as a new addition to our conceptual frameworks, but which does not build far beyond the extant work on illiberal nationalists. Finally, part of the problem hinges on the fact that Warlouzet clearly defines his trinity of concepts, but not what he means by the “capitalism” they all have in common, such that “solidarity capitalism” extends even to revolutionary Marxism, which was many things but not best understood as an approach to governing capitalism. As a result, the book is a very effective history of European integration, but the question of how best to govern capitalism remains unanswered.