REGULATING GLOBAL CORPORATE CAPITALISM by SOL PICCIOTTO
| Author | SIMON GLAZE |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2012.00595.x |
| Date | 01 September 2012 |
| Published date | 01 September 2012 |
REGULATING GLOBAL CORPORATE CAPITALISM by SOL PICCIOTTO
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 602 pp., £40.00)
This book seeks to `trace the historical develop ment of the central
institutions of corporate capitalism' (p. 451), to highlight the pivotal role
played by lawyers in the transformation of its governance from the classical
liberal system to contemporary networked forms, and to relate the issues of
legitimacy connected to this shift from the market economy to the corporatist
economy. Picciotto explains this shift to what he terms the current `post-
liberal' phase in terms of the growth of and connections between local,
national, global, meta, infra-, intra-, and supranational forms of regulation
and their relationship to key areas of governance in the global economy over
the last two centuries, including global trade, finance, intellectual property
rights, and the rise of corporate capitalism. In so doing, he is able to
illuminate some of the multiple links that exist between levels of legal,
insti tuti onal , and reg ulat ory fo rms of go vern ance a s well as t he
transformatory implications of this for states, whose role in creating this
set of circumstances is additionally emphasized by the author.
The book provides insight into global corporate capitalism's development
and its contemporary governance through providing detailed examples of the
generation and, in some cases, impacts of the growth in hyper-regulation that
has taken place during this shift to networked governance. This is achieved
through contextualizing the development of these rules and institutions both
in their immediate socio-economic setting and in their long-term historical
perspective via detailed examination of salient legal, institutional, and
regulatory developments over successive periods of time since the mid-
nineteenth century.
Picciotto unveils his main argument regarding the issues of legitimacy
surrounding lawyers' influence upon global corporatist capitalism in a subtle
manner throughout the later stages of the book, only reiterating this main
point of his argument more forcefully in the final chapter. Despite this
potential unevenness in achieving his stated intentions for the book, the
detailed exposi tion herein of the nu merous laws, inst itutions, rules ,
agreements, treaties, regulatory bodies, and standards that have been created
and developed in the shift from the liberal to post-liberal phase of global
capitalism can serve as an important corrective to the imbalance that
currently exists in debates that at times forego such a detailed approach when
engaging in the types of abstract theorizing that the author identifies.
The understated manner through which this is achieved is perhaps a
reflection of the view expressed in the book's preface that: `The attempt to
impose one's ideas on the world is a pointless and sometimes dangerous
exercise' (pp. xi±xii). To be sure, the restrained approach that Picciotto
employs throughout the book is largely effective in so far as it allows the
central argument to unfold in a subtle manner once the broader significance of
such a conclusion has already been firmly established. As noted, the argument
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ß2012 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2012 Cardiff University Law School
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