Tully Rector has posted Book Review: Capital, Autonomy, and the Limits of Corporate Critique (Journal of Law and Political Economy, 3(3)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Jean-Philippe Robé’s Property, Power and Politics: Why We Need to Rethink the World Power System presents, primarily in its second half, a forensic study of the advantages firms are afforded by their corporate structure, and their use of those advantages to externalize costs, evade political obligations, shield themselves from accountability, and denature the legal orders in which they operate. It is a very valuable contribution. My focus here concerns a constellation of elements central to this system of advantages. These are: the specific kind of property owned and controlled by firms; that property’s power-conferring features; and the normative criteria by which its present distribution and use should be assessed. I want to put pressure on Robé’s treatment of the first and second topics, using a more robust conception of capital, and critique on that basis his assumptions regarding the third. My overall point is that—while the book exposes the pathologies of the multinational system, and cogently explains how they operate—corporate power is condemned in that analysis by normative reasons that, when systematically examined, bear with equal force upon the powers of private capital more broadly. This vitiates the book’s final remedies. Its “rethinking” effort is incomplete.
