Resilience Drainage and the Role of Private Law
The laws that apply to market activities have long catered to the interests of seasoned market actors. Who, then, is to watch out for us lay market users?
Weekly Roundup: September 10, 2021
Introducing vulnerability theory, Martha McCluskey on the mythical ideal of the autonomous subject, and Brian Highsmith on the curse of fiscal federalism.
Countering Neoliberal Logic with the Vulnerable Human Subject
Given the human condition of inevitable uncertainty and fragility, societal prosperity depends on supporting diversely situated knowledge and inclusive power—not on maximizing rewards for a few seemingly superior winners.
Vulnerability Theory and the Political Economy of Resilience
The LPE Blog introduces a particularly effective way to begin ridding the law of neoliberalism: the vulnerability theory.
The 10 Most Read Posts of 2020
The August hit parade continues, featuring posts by K-Sue Park, Karl Klare, and Veena Dubal.
The 10 Most Read Posts of 2019
The August hit parade continues, featuring entries by Aziz Rana, Michelle Wilde Anderson, and Samuel Moyn, among others.
Public-Washing the Private Interest in International Investment Law
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. The Neoliberal Republic offers an insightful portrayal of how neoliberalism has permeated France in the past decades. The book helps us to grasp how the legal universe has been deeply implicated in the power…
What Makes the Republic Neoliberal?
This post is part of our symposium on The Neoliberal Republic by Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France. Read all posts here. Like many other new shiny things, it ended with disappointment. Emmanuel Macron’s victory in 2017 was hailed as the advent of ‘le nouveau monde’ vis-à-vis the old political elites—a glimmer of hope in the…
Deconstructing the Public-Private Distinction in “The Neoliberal Republic”
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…
Neoliberalism, Corporate law, and the Reconstruction of the French State
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…
The Neoliberal Republic: Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France
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…
Where is the Political Economy?
Embracing the terms “economy” and “political economy,” as LPE has done, risks – unless we are careful – 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.
An Algorithmic Bon Marché? Platform Governance in Urban Spaces
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.…
Government Failures and Private Options
Increasingly progressives are championing “public options” as a response to various market failures. Public options in the all-important health care space stand in for old-school regulation of private providers and old-school redistribution (to better support those struggling to pay for private insurance and medical services). Public options in banking, likewise championed by leading progressives, work substantially…
What is the “Free Market Family” and How Can We End It?
What drives free-market family policy is a fundamentally wrongheaded view about the economy and the ends it should serve. US policymakers equate the economy with markets alone, and then treat rising GDP as the sum total of economic success. But the economic system, properly conceived, is, simply yet more broadly, the system for getting people the resources they need to flourish—material, caretaking, educational, and leisure—individually and collectively. (This is the first post in a symposium.)