My previous post – the ten books a well-educated social science student ought to have read – generated a lot of terrific comments with other suggestions, which I’ll mull over and compile into an alternative list at the weekend.

Meanwhile, I’ve read [amazon_link id=”0674504917″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law[/amazon_link] by Brett Christophers. I greatly admired his previous book, [amazon_link id=”1444338293″ target=”_blank” ]Banking Across Boundaries[/amazon_link], and this new one has the same compelling combination of analysis and historical detail. The theme this time is capitalism as a constant balance between competitive markets and market power, these two forces applied by laws and their enforcement. Anti-trust laws are enacted or enforced with greater rigour when monopoly power gets out of hand. Intellectual property laws are strengthened after periods of cut-throat competition. In contrast to those – often Marxist – writers who have seen a single direction of travel toward ever-greater monopoly power, Christophers argues here that there is a cycle. He cites [amazon_link id=”0853450811″ target=”_blank” ]Kalecki[/amazon_link], but also Marx’s dialectics: “Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly,” Christophers quotes Marx as writing in a letter of 1846.

[amazon_image id=”0674504917″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law[/amazon_image]

The book starts with three chapters setting out Christophers’ analytical framework and explaining in more detail the dynamic to and fro between more and less market power for businesses. It is very interesting to see an analysis of this kind in terms of the legal framework. While law has hardly been ignored by economists, this big picture, historical perspective provides much food for thought. As Christophers puts it in the introduction, modern political economy has tended to focus more on the sphere of production, whereas competition and IP law concern the sphere of exchange. Yet many of the flash points in public policy today concern exactly competition and intellectual property, precisely because the basic productive structure of the economy is being changed by technology. The two spheres meet.

This means [amazon_link id=”0674504917″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Leveler[/amazon_link] is an important contribution to understanding some of the most acute modern policy – and political – questions. The analysis of the first half is followed by two chapters looking at the historical experience of the US and UK from the late 19th century, and a final chapter on 21st century monopoly. Recent decades have seen the phase of the cycle where enforcement of competition diminishes and enforcement of IP protection increases. Christophers links this to the Chicago School of economics, with its powerful impact on public policy on both sides of the Atlantic. He sees little sign that this has changed even now: “Post-Chicago developments have certainly entailed meaningful changes in antitrust thinking and practice, but such changes ultimately amount to small beer compared to the changes that the Chicago revolution itself heralded.” The ‘post-Chicago’ work of economists such as Jean Tirole, Christophers argues, have concerned specific business practices or mergers rather than the framework of competition law as a whole.

As for policy approaches to intellectual property, there is little sign of any recent redressing of the balance, for all the forceful concerns many people – academics and regulators – have voiced about excessive protection, from the TRIPS clauses to copyright madness. Indeed, this chapter argues that strong IP protection was deemed pro-competitive by Chicago-flavoured thinkers (I’m afraid Christophers does use the adjective ‘neoliberal’, although it obscures rather than clarifies matters, given that so many non-economists use it to describe all economists, as if there were no differences of opinion or political philosophy in my professsion). He underlines the irony that ‘pro-market’ can mean either pro-competition (citing early Mont Pelerin economists such as Lionel Robbins) or ‘pro-business’ (ie anti-competition), as – he argues – many law-and-economics  ‘neoliberals’ are today.

The book concludes: “Political economy never sits still.” This is a terrifically interesting book, one for anybody interested in political economy, or just in the narrower canvas of law and economics.

There’s no doubt the plates are shifting again now, although who knows where they will take us – the political and economic forces undermining the post-1980s structure are powerful, yet there is no alternative intellectual framework, in contrast to the preparedness of the early Chicago School in the mid to late 20th century. I was much struck by Daniel Stedman Jones’s account in [amazon_link id=”0691161011″ target=”_blank” ]Masters of the Universe[/amazon_link] of the systematic preparation of that earlier generation of economists to change the public philosophy – decades-worth of research and influencing. It’s clear – especially after reading [amazon_link id=”0674504917″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Leveler[/amazon_link] – that the balance ought to tilt back now away from monopoly protection toward competition enforcement, as the dominant model of capitalism is self-undermining. But who knows how or whether that will come about? Christophers ends with Lenin’s prediction that the future is capitalist monopoly on the international stage, monopoly imperialism. I have more confidence in self-correcting mechanisms. We will see.

PS. Christopher May, much cited in The Great Leveler, is the author of [amazon_link id=”B00ZY8G016″ target=”_blank” ]The Rule of Law: The Common Sense of Global Politics[/amazon_link], published in paperback last year. I haven’t read it, but it offers an explanation of why global politics so often seems to turn on legal issues. “In accessible terms, Christopher May argues that we can no longer merely use the idea of the rule of law without question but rather must appreciate its multifaceted and contested character if we are to begin to understand how and why it is now seen as a ‘good thing’ across the political spectrum,” according to the blurb.

[amazon_image id=”B00ZY8G016″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rule of Law: The Common Sense of Global Politics by Christopher May (2014) Hardcover[/amazon_image]