Near the end of How Will Capitalism End? Wolfgang Streeck explicates the benefits and limitations of sociology as a means of understanding the inherent flaws and contradictions of 20th and 21st-century capitalism by suggesting that, "Sociology...deals with historically unique situations in which more causal factors than one are at work, and if sociologists dare make[sp] predictions at all, these are typically highly hedged" (448). Indeed, How Will Capitalism End? is an attempt to understand and predict the viability of capitalism in an economy that increasingly sees the failed utopian promises of globalization. However, Streeck is also interesting in the methodologies that have failed (by his estimation) to predict these problems correctly, such as economics, politic science, and psychology. He seems to enjoy referring to contemporary economics as having an "intellectual hegemony" over discursive spaces about capitalism (472). This is a powerful line of argumentation since it suggests that modern theories that attempt to understand capitalism suffer from the same hegemonic problems, notably the comfortable assumption of their rightness. Or, as Streeck explains, "Economists, the social gurus of our time, with their machine models of economy and society, still have the boldness to offer exact predictions" (447).

Yet, Streeck's overarching idea regarding capitalism fails to pivot from Marx's suggestion that capitalism creates the conditions for its demise. Also, dwelling on the history of capitalism and its need for economic depression or crisis to survive once again fails to move beyond canonized critiques of capitalism. For example, at one point early in the book, Streeck argues, "The end of capitalism can then be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts, or from a multiplicity of infirmities each of which will be all the more untreatable" (39).

Nevertheless, this is a fine book that persuasively suggests that what we need is not only a new system but a new (or old?) methodology of critiquing our current one.