TRACK AI Event : Book Talk

Author: Jamee K. Moudud, Professor Economics, Sarah Lawrence College (US),  and Board Member, Law and Political Economy Collective.

Discussant: Dina Waked, Professor, Sciences Po.

This event will be a discussion of Jamee K. Moudud's latest book which seeks to explore progressive alternatives in the current period of multiple crises involving climatic instability, surveillance capitalism and AI technology, and authoritarianism. The book is a contribution to the area of Economics as Social Theory.  The title is an extension of John R. Commons’ classic book “Legal Foundations of Capitalism” and an important article by John Maynard Keynes, “The End of Laissez Faire”.  By drawing on the insights of the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist tradition along with those of Adam Smith, Karl Polanyi, and Piero Sraffa it provides new insights on the nature of institutions in capitalism.  By arguing that society is a political community it challenges the private law versus public law or state versus markets distinction.  With a central focus on property and money it uses the Law and Political Economy framework to understand power in different contexts, ranging from monetary sovereignty and colonialism to comparative constitutional law and social rights, the political economy of corporations and competition, social cost theory, and authoritarian liberalism.  This book argues that laissez faire is the foundational myth of capitalism and that “state intervention versus de‑regulation” and “market failures versus free markets” are false dichotomies. By closely engaging with the insights of Friedrich Hayek and Douglass North, it challenges New Institutional Economics and its intellectual roots.  The book proposes the need to engage with legal‑economic theory and history to understand what institutions are, what economic regulation means, law’s intrinsic connection to the economy, and the distribution of power relations within capitalism.