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LPE Originals

The Stakes of Law as a Productive Force

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What follows, politically, from the idea that law is constitutive of capitalism? What theories of social change does this view make available, where does it locate possibilities for political agency, and what kinds of political energies might it unleash?
LPE Originals

What Law Cannot Explain (or Solve) about Capitalism

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If capitalism is a legal regime above all else, then legal reform is not only necessary but sufficient in order to achieve democratic self-governance, ecological sustainability, and equality. As the collapse of the WTO and the rise of China suggest, however, law alone does not decide who holds economic power.
LPE Originals

Rewriting the Laws of Capitalism

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When new constitutional orders came about in the 18th and 19th centuries, they left intact the private legal order that they inherited from feudalism, entrenching property rights and contracts as bulwarks against economic democracy. Reforming this system will require placing private law on a normative foundation that is compatible with democratic self-ordering.
LPE Originals

What Could LPE Want from a Method?

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Law and economics offers a portable, teachable procedure that students can learn in a semester and apply across fields. Should LPE aim to develop a rival procedure of its own, or should it aspire to a different kind of methodological maturity?
LPE Originals

Taking Social Relations as the Basic Unit of Analysis

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In capitalism, social relations of production exert outsized force on all other domains, distorting and warping relations of reproduction, protection, and meaning-making without fully annihilating their internal capacity to structure relations in their distinct domains. This approach to understanding society, in which social relations are taken as the basic unit of analysis, helps clarify the place of “the state” in capitalism, the role of law in legitimating capitalism, and the relationship between culture, technology, and politics under capitalism.
LPE Originals

Politics, Culture, and Capitalism

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How much autonomy does politics have from the prevailing economic order? And what role does culture play in shaping politics? Answers to these questions will help determine law’s potential role in advancing democratic efforts to shape the terms of common life.
LPE Originals

Capital and Law as Social Forms

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Where do profits come from? And how does law legitimate capitalism? To make progress on these questions, we must dig deeper into the nature of capital and the idea of the legal form.
LPE Originals

A Social Theory of Law in Capitalism

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Understanding law’s role in producing the imperatives of capitalism and the relative power of those who occupy different roles in production allows us to identify reforms capable of transforming the structure of those relations.
LPE Originals

What Rolls Downhill

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Recent calls for mandatory retirement in academia are a reminder that class and other social hierarchies are something like mountains with increasingly dense fog toward their peaks: the higher up one is, the less one understands that upon which and above which one stands.
LPE Originals

Cradle to the Grave

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As Sam Moyn has recently argued, “class reductionism” fails to explain differentiation along the generational gradient — a pattern clearly visible in economics, politics, and ideology. Yet a clear picture of how age mediates class would reveal not gerontocracy, but capitalism and the fractionated class system it produces.
LPE Originals

Twilight of the Gods

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Contemporary proponents of law and economics claim to have abandoned the idea that law is an instrument for maximizing economic efficiency and wealth. Corporate law scholars haven’t yet heard the good news.