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LPE Originals

What Makes the Republic Neoliberal?

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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…
LPE Originals

Where is the Political Economy?

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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.
LPE Originals

What is the “Free Market Family” and How Can We End It?

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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.)
LPE Originals

The Road to Free-Market Family Policy

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There’s a widely accepted story that the US’s reliance on markets and paid work over direct government provision in supporting families derives from the country’s unique, longstanding economic ideology supporting free enterprise. A close attention to the historical record shows that this story is a myth.
LPE Originals

Basic Income, Care, and Wages for Housework

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The question of whether basic income can resolve the problem of unpaid care work and the status of care work more generally requires addressing how a basic income is financed, because it is only as a redistributive program that basic income can have an emancipatory effect for those whose work is obscured by the structure of modern capitalist economies and undervalued by the market. It is only by broadening our perspective, for the moment, away from the details of basic income as a social policy, and to basic income as a revolutionary perspective on capitalism, that the emancipatory effect becomes clear.
LPE Originals

UBI and Immigrants: Lessons from the Pandemic

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Surely advocates of such programs do not envision Qatar as their model society. And yet it is too easy to imagine a version of a Gulf state arising from a basic income initiative that provides cash support to citizens, who no longer need to take work that is unsatisfying, while denying it to noncitizens, who are brought in do the difficult and dangerous jobs that remain.
LPE Originals

Not an “Achievement Gap”, a Racial Capitalist Chasm

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Throughout this pandemic, transnational corporations and white parents alike have been sounding the “achievement gap” alarm under the guise of concern for “voiceless” Black and Brown children, but in service of their own neoliberal agendas. The students they speak of, however, can speak for themselves — and as they struggle through this time, with a fierce resilience that no young person should be forced to cultivate, their realities and their words call for more radical solutions.
LPE Originals

On Justice Ginsburg and the Political Economy of the Family

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The argument that gender stereotypes structured law, and therefore shaped social identities and practices, is relatively familiar to historians and legal scholars. Less widely discussed is how gender ideologies influenced the development in the United States of what sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen termed a liberal welfare state. How did Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vision of feminism fit in with other movements at the time?