Despite the reversal of America's fortune from the triumphalism of the Roaring Nineties to the gloom of the lost decade and the Great Depression, theoretical conceptions of US capitalism have remained surprisingly unchanged. This book departs from the American political economy literature to identify three common myths that have shaped our conceptualization of US capitalism: its reduction to a state-market dyad dis-embedded from societal factors; the illusion of a weak state and the synchronic conception of the US variety of capitalism.

To remedy these pitfalls, the authors propose...