Interview: Jamee Moudud on the Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism

Sarah Lawrence professor Jamee Moudud has written a comprehensive, cross-academic specialty book, The Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism, drawing on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a theory of legal institutionalism or institutional political economy. By arguing that society is a political community it challenges the private law versus public law or state versus markets distinction.

Focusing on property, money and credit, constitutional law, and corporations 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. Professor Moudud 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.

He was kind enough to answer our questions.

Your background is in economics but you became interested in law and politics — what is the biggest difference in the way the disciplines approach these issues? The vocabulary? The assumptions? The priorities?

This is big question since these disciplines are not monolithic. So for example, economics has deep intellectual fractures within it. The dominant neoclassical economics school (“orthodox economics”) has to be contrasted…