Description (adaptation from Publisher’s website):

This book is a contribution to the area of Economics as Social Thought.  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. Focusing on property, credit and public finance, constitutional law and social rights, corporations, and authoritarianism this book argues that laissez faire has never existed and that “state intervention versus de‑regulation” and “market failures versus free markets” are false dichotomies. It challenges New Institutional Economics and its intellectual roots and 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. The book will be of interest to readers of economics, law, public policy, international and development studies, and all those seeking to explore progressive alternatives in this period of multiple crises.

Jamee K. Moudud, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: the End of Laissez Faire?, (Routledge, 2025), available here.