This week I received the good news that I've had an article accepted at Economy & Society, one of the best peer-reviewed journals in my field. This is exciting for me (but if you can't fathom why, forget it; I'd have to start using expressions such as 'RAE' and 'academic job market' until you wanted to kill yourself).
It's called 'Economics and the "nonsense" of law: the case of the Chicago antitrust revolution', and you can download a preprint copy here [pdf] (copyright acknowledgement at the bottom of this post).
One of the central claims in the article may appear rather counter-intuitive: Chicago School economists were less committed to markets and price mechanisms than to economics and price theory. There is a pronounced epistemological pragmatism at work. The article focuses heavily on Ronald Coase's influence, that fed through the Law & Economics movement, then manifested itself in the renewed antitrust architecture of the neo-liberal era. Markets that worked ideally were of little interest (or, indeed, plausibility) to those in this tradition. The important thing was to set about rationalising areas of society, including the state, that were not explicitly determined by prices. Sovereign law was a metaphysical 'nonsense' that needed reframing in terms of incentives and effects. It concludes:
The ‘Chicago Revolution’ was not simply a Kuhnian revolution within economic orthodoxy, but a strategic project of professional colonisation. Simons’s appointment to run the Chicago Law School presaged this, albeit with little deliberate intent to colonise legal thinking. From there on, however, lawyers were encouraged to view their own discipline as polluted with nonsense, and to view price theory as the means of cleansing it. The rhetorical skills of Coase and Director proved critical in making the case for efficiency as the only ‘obvious’ basis for determining the implementation of law. The fact that conservative lawyers could not only grasp this logic, but develop it as a critique of the state was a testimony to its simplicity. Once price theory is accepted as common sense, state actions that seek to improve on the decision-making of individuals come to appear ridiculous.
This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in Economy & Society © 2009 [copyright Taylor & Francis]; Economy and Society is available online at http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/
Terrific piece. It sheds a lot of light on a few key problems in my own thesis. Thanks for posting this.
Posted by: dk.au | March 17, 2009 at 11:12 PM
Great. Glad it was of interest.
Posted by: Will Davies | March 19, 2009 at 11:26 AM