This book is a contribution to the area of economics as social thought. The title is a nod to both John R. Commons’ classic book Legal Foundations of Capitalism and John Maynard Keynes’ important article The End of Laissez Faire.
Drawing on concepts from original institutional economics and the American legal realist tradition along with the ideas of Adam Smith, Karl Polanyi, and Piero Sraffa, the author, Jamee K. Moudud, offers new insights on the nature of institutions in capitalism. He argues that society is a political community and challenges the distinctions between private law and public law and between the state and markets. Focusing on property, credit and public finance, constitutional law and social rights, corporations, and authoritarianism, he maintains that laissez-faire has never existed and that the dichotomies between state intervention and de‑regulation and between market failures and free markets are erroneous. Moudud challenges new institutional economics and its intellectual roots and posits that it is necessary to engage with legal economic theory and history to understand what institutions are, what economic regulation means, how law is intrinsically connected to the economy, and how power is distributed within capitalism.
The book will be of interest to readers of economics, law, public policy, international and development studies, and all those seeking to explore progressive economic alternatives in this period of multiple crises.
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