That both books under review include the term “capitalism” in their title or subtitle may indicate a heightened attention to fundamental questions of political economy among scholars in recent years. Both Joshua Barkan and Steven A. Ramirez treat the financial and economic crisis of 2007–8 and its aftermath as a point of departure for their studies. Central to each author is an argument about the relationship of law to capitalism. In recent decades, the law and economics school of thought has argued for the application of neoclassical, microeconomic market assumptions in judicial decision making. Both authors challenge these neoliberal assumptions.

In Corporate Sovereignty, Barkan argues that corporate power should be thought of as a mode of political sovereignty. Rejecting the distinction between the economic power of corporations and the political sovereignty of states, he contends that corporate and sovereign power are “ontologically linked” through a principle of “legally sanctioned immunity of law” (p. 4). While the relationship between the state and corporations may appear to be adversarial, “it is in fact a kind of doubling, in which the fate of state sovereignty and corporate power are conjoined and also in conflict” (p. 4). Corporations and states model each other’s defining features, depend on one another, and establish the other’s conditions of possibility. “Nonetheless,” Barkan writes, “the relation is full of tension, as these institutional ensembles mix and threaten one another’s existence” (p. 6).

Barkan’s book is intellectually ambitious and challenging. The author uses Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “the ban” to argue that “the corporation, as a politicolegal concept, plays an important role in establishing the legally defined borders and limits of law as well as spaces and cases where laws apply only to the extent of not being applicable” (p. 8). Some readers will probably struggle to understand concepts such as “the ban,” doubling, and biopolitics, which are not often employed in the critical analysis of corporate power, but which pervade and structure Barkan’s narrative. Drawing on Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, Barkan describes his approach as a “genealogical” one that treats “objects and institutions as the effects of discursive practices that attempt to define them” (p. 15).

Using a wide range of sources primarily from Anglo-American history and political theory, Barkan traces the changing relationships in the modern era between corporations and sovereignty in chapters on “The Sovereign Gift,” “Property,” “Personhood,” “Territory,” “Responsibility,” and “The Corporate University.” He shows that corporate sovereignty developed in the early modern period as a way of exerting “police power.” In contrast to contemporary understandings of police forces, “police science” in sixteenth-century England viewed the state as a household and aimed at the wise superintendence and distribution of things in society, including food, forests, highways, hunting, dress, and health, in addition to trade and commerce. The force of Barkan’s claim is to associate the corporation as an institutional form with questions of collective action and “being in common,” and to make contingent the identification of corporations with the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. It was only in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a liberal capitalist view of corporations as a form of property with legal rights against the state and as a legal embodiment of capital became entrenched. Using an impressive array of sources, he addresses in two chapters the global ramifications of this transformation, connecting the rise of multinational corporations to theories of space and territory, and to legal notions of comity and personhood. He probes the discourse of corporate “social responsibility,” finding its regulatory bent to be largely depoliticizing and failing to question capitalist forms of sovereignty.

It is in his chapter on the corporate university that Barkan most strongly develops an alternative to the capitalist form of corporateness. He details the many ways in which universities are shaped by processes of business-oriented corporatization. While proclaiming his solidarity with campaigns to resist these processes, Barkan refuses to accept that corporations, as an organizational form, must be based on capitalist goals, and he advances his critical approach, drawing on a 1950 pamphlet by the émigré historian Ernst Kantorowizc, because of the “possibilities it fosters for collective practices of critical thought and action” (p. 153). The author’s genealogical exploration aims to show that universities are “collectivities completely and totally distinct from the logics of capitalist accumulation” (p. 160).

Several questions might be raised about the political implications of Barkan’s genealogical analysis. To what extent is the model of the university as a space for noncapitalist corporateness transferable to other corporate forms, especially capitalist business corporations? Is Barkan suggesting that the deconstruction of corporations and capitalism can take place within Fortune 500 companies, among its workers, managers, and shareholders? Does he hope more broadly that a cultural transformation of public discourse that delinks corporate sovereignty from capitalism will create new possibilities for political action? Is the thrust of his argument to support the creation and expansion of noncapitalist democratic economic institutions, such as those surveyed by Gar Alperovitz in America Beyond Capitalism (2004)? Answers to such questions might clarify the nature of the call for an “affirmative biopolitics” with which Barkan ends his book (p. 165).

The question of systematic alternatives is also raised by Ramirez’s book. Its title suggests a critical analysis of contemporary capitalism, examining the origins of the subprime crisis and the broader financial and economic downturn of 2007–8. Lawless Capitalism is certainly that, but it is also a detailed prescription for a “reconstructed form of capitalism.” This alternate form of capitalism functions as the normative foundation for Ramirez’s critical diagnosis of the roots of the crisis. The author argues that “[c]apitalism can reach its full macroeconomic potential only through the operation of a sound economic rule of law that can resist the political influence of elites and move toward a more perfect operation that serves to unleash human productive capacity to the maximum extent possible” (p. xviii). Concentrated economic power, high levels of inequality, and a weak legal and regulatory infrastructure imperil “perfect competition,” which he defines as involving “zero privilege, zero disempowerment, all actors are rule takers, and rational transaction costs” (p. 44).

Ramirez finds support for reconstructed capitalism in the findings of modern growth theory and modern trade theory, which underscore the role of law and institutions in facilitating human capital development, or human “empowerment,” as a means of yielding greater macroeconomic growth and stability. Government intervention in markets can spur growth. In addition to regulation, Ramirez emphasizes the role of education in stimulating knowledge, ideas, and innovations. When combined with calls for government to underwrite consumption and buying power and to offset excessive inequality and concentrations of economic power, his view of the role of government in promoting the right sort of capitalism looks like an updated version of Keynesianism, as is suggested by his positive references to Keynes and to neo-Keynesians like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.

For Ramirez, the American economic system went off track in the 1980s. What caused the move to deregulation and the weakening of law? His explanation points to a self-interested power grab by corporate elites to distort law and policy that in previous decades had served to balance corporate power and offset market failures. As Ramirez puts it in his Preface, “this book lays responsibility for our dysfunctional economic system squarely at the feet of those holding the greatest power over the legal structure underlying that system—a relative handful of financial and corporate elites in league with their government cronies. Following the money leads to those few in control of vast wealth” (p. xvii).

In this well-researched book, Ramirez analyzes in detail such topics as corporate governance law, financial regulation, neoliberal globalization, and monetary policy. In each case, he discusses the loss of sound law and regulatory policy in recent decades, indentifies self-interested ideas and shopworn ideology as the culprits, and makes recommendations so that capitalism may reach its full macroeconomic potential. In addition, he devotes a chapter to “the costs of economic oppression” in which he examines the role of race in fostering inequality and in deepening the subprime and economic crises. Characteristically, he contends that bad policies and practices are actually counterproductive from the standpoint of virtuous capitalism and that “cultural diversity can help a society make better decisions and achieve superior cognitive outcomes” (p. 147). Ramirez advocates a rule of law that would act as a constitutional barrier to concentrated economic power. Among his many proposed areas of reform are depoliticizing regulatory agencies, enhancing professionalism among public managers, creating more meaningful criminal liability, and, in general, widening the array of restraints on the economic elite whose irresponsibility has created the crisis. At the time of writing, he did not see much evidence of new ways of thinking among political leaders, as is shown by his very critical discussion of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, which he views as woefully inadequate.

This is a valuable book. Several questions and possible limitations occur to this reviewer. First, there is no discussion of a political strategy to implement the policies advocated by Ramirez, a shortcoming that is very common in the genre. Second, the author’s explanation of the crisis of recent decades does not draw on or engage with neo-Marxian and other heterodox perspectives that examine the structural factors that led to the breakdown of the post—World War II political economy and the logic of the turn to neoliberalism (from the standpoint of capital) in the 1980s. His somewhat overly voluntaristic approach may understate the obstacles to transitioning to a high-road capitalism that would make almost everyone happy except greedy elites.Third, is “full macro-economic potential” the sole grounding of policy? I am sure that Ramirez would contest such a characterization of his position, but in this sense, Barkan’s somewhat abstruse emphasis on alternative ways of being offers a useful balance of values.

Both books are thus well worth reading, and together suggest ways in which normative questions of citizenship and political identity and analytical questions about inequality and the political economy of American democracy might be combined and productively explored.