This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. The Neoliberal Transformation of the State Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France take the reader backstage in The Neoliberal Republic, providing empirically rich insights into how neoliberalism has permeated French state institutions. More specifically, their…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Here is a simple story. France, whose economy was largely in state hands, decides to privatize many state-owned enterprises. This move is inspired both by neoliberal theories promoting the superior economic benefits of markets…
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. For most scholars and commentators in France and abroad, the election of Emmanuel Macron as president was met with surprise and dismay. The rapid ascent to the apex of power of a thirty-nine-year-old technocrat…
Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks invoking just the kind of separate, reified realm that we are trying to critique. In our view, defining “the economy,” and studying how legal institutions have done so, should be central issues that LPE scholarship aims to address.
The last few decades have been characterized by the return of market fundamentalism: the belief that society can and should be organized through the institutional mechanism of “self-regulating markets.” Many expected that the 2008 financial crisis might constitute a blow to pervasive market expansion and a check on global dominance of private corporations. Not so.…
Toward a theory of market and firm that rejects the Coasian frame altogether.
If political morality is to inform our analysis of legal institutions, it must account for the way that these institutions construct coalitions and endow them unequally with power. Theories that focus on fairness or political equality do not sufficiently account for these dynamic and iterative aspects of institutions. What is needed is a democratic morality of empowering the disempowered.
Are social media platforms more like common carriers or newspapers? The answer is neither. And that answer has significant implications for how Courts should treat regulation of content moderation.
One of the key theses of Marx’s Capital is the primacy of production over circulation. But there is ample reason to believe this is a false dichotomy: exploitation and surplus value creation happen both in the spheres of production circulation. So where does that leave us?
This weekend, Chileans will elect a Constitutional Convention. This Constitution will finally replace that which Pinochet’s junta put into place, in one of the first victories of neoliberalism. Why is this Convention happening now? And what are its prospects?
The progressive antitrust narrative is based on profoundly flawed analysis of the farm economy. The break ’em up approach may distribute property rights in human and animal misery more evenly, but it does not address the exploitation at the heart of the system.
Anti-monopolists are right to worry about the concentrated power of institutional investors, but they are wrong to treat them as all bad. Common ownership presents an opportunity for the left to divide the interests of capitalists.
In a previous post, one of us described why we need global cooperation to achieve massively scaled up production of COVID vaccines. The United States must play a key role in this process, because it has the ability to mobilize resources, and powerful leverage over companies that have so far resisted serious participation in global efforts – especially Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J. Some commentators question whether the US has the power to compel this cooperation. Others have doubted the relevance of the demand coming from developing countries to temporarily waive the requirements of the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Agreement to facilitate more manufacturing. In this post, we explain why existing US law gives the Biden Administration the power to mandate sharing and overcome IP barriers, and how the TRIPS waiver can contribute importantly to efforts to scale up production at a global scale.
The shortage of vaccines is a manmade problem, brought on by the false promise of innovation-by-monopoly and by reproduction of colonial dynamics. Our global R&D system layers privatized control and profits for huge firms based in rich countries atop a vast regime of open science and public subsidy. We can scale up production if we force pharma to share.
If green spending is not excluded from current economic governance rules, environmental protection will be subordinated to same austerity logic as other social policies.
