In this special episode, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson and Will Beaman to discuss his new article “(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust,” which was recently published in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. The conversation traces the development of Rob’s long-standing interest in theories of trust from his doctoral research in literary studies towards an increasing fascination with the topic of money which eventually led him to MMT, neochartalism and the Money on the Left project. Rob recalls a jarring moment when, having become excited by the possibility of bringing MMT into his research on literature and trust, he realised that some neochartalists reject the idea that money is trust-based. Determined to think this relationship through in greater depth, Rob’s article reaches the conclusion that neochartalism demands a re-theorisation of the concept of trust itself. In this wide-ranging conversation, Rob, Scott, and Will work through some of the key moves the article makes, including the problematisation of barter-like theories of “calculative trust,” its consideration of the connection between trust and vulnerability, and the way trusting blurs the distinction between conditionality and unconditionality (as alluded to in the article’s title). Finally, the discussion addresses links between trust, the university (as an institution), and the uni currency proposal, and situates Rob’s work within the heterodox and heterogeneous interdisciplinary academic, para-academic, and extra-academic field that is contemporary neochartalism.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Heterodox economist Jamee K. Moudud returns to Money on the Left to discuss his new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire? (Routledge, 2025).

The phrase “institutions matter” is a common refrain among economists, including many who have proposed progressive alternatives to free market fundamentalism. For Moudud, however, this proposition doesn’t go far enough, leaving a host of problematic assumptions unquestioned. To remedy this, Moudud draws on the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realist traditions to propose a robust theory of legal institutionalism or institutional political economy.

At its core, Moudud argues, society is a political community founded on property rights, money, credit, constitutional law, and legally-endowed corporations. From this premise, he concludes that laissez-faire has never truly existed and that seemingly natural dichotomies between “state intervention” and “deregulation” or “free markets” and “market failures” are as baseless as they are false. Moudud’s book, by contrast, urges us to engage with legal-economic theory and history to understand what institutions are and what economic regulation truly means. He asks: How does law order the economy? How does money shape power relations?

Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism should be of interest to readers of economics, law, and public policy, as well as those in international and development studies or anyone seeking to explore progressive alternatives in this period of multiple crises.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott Ferguson 

Jamee Moudud, welcome to Money on the Left. I should say, welcome back to Money on the Left. 

Jamee Moudud 

Thank you so much for the invitation. It’ll be a lot of fun talking to the two of you. 

Scott Ferguson 

We’ve invited you to speak with us yet again. I think you were first on Money on the Left in our inaugural first year. I think it was back in 2018.  

Jamee Moudud 

I think it was ages ago. 

Scott Ferguson 

At the time we spoke to you about the law and political economy and modern monetary theory nexus with a special concentration on questions of power. At the time, I believe that you told us you were working on a book which, as for those of us who write books, we know these are a long time in the making. 

Finally, you’ve written the book. The book has been recently published with Routledge. The title of the book is Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism and the subtitle provocative poses the question, The End of Laissez Faire? Welcome to Money on the Left, and I’m going to love to talk to you about your book.

Do you want to tell our listeners who were not familiar with your first interview, which everybody should go back and listen to, a little bit about your background and how you came to write this book. 

Jamee Moudud 

The background is, depending on how far you want to go, but in a previous life, I used to be an engineer. As an engineer, my politics changed. That was at Cornell. Then there was a professor there who suggested in the Department of City and Regional Planning that I go to the New School for Social Research to get my PhD in Economics. 

I had taken my first course in the government department on Marx with Susan Buck-Morss. That was an inspirational course for me. I was introduced to the Frankfurt School and Marx and all this. I went to the New School to get my PhD in Economics and became very interested in Marx. 

I joined Sarah Lawrence College once I finished my doctorate. That’s been an incredible journey for me because I was really enmeshed in this culture, which is interdisciplinary. There’s no disciplinary boundaries, entering into conversations with students and colleagues about Economics, but in conversation with history or politics. 

That kind of shaped the way I think about these issues. Then at some point, I think it had to do with the question of taxation, because I’ve been teaching courses on fiscal sociology. That tradition at Sarah Lawrence, I realized that I really don’t understand taxation, and economists, including heterodox economists. I was a heterodox economist. 

I don’t really like this term, but I use the term critical political economy. In my book, I realized that I just didn’t know what taxation means. We just take the small “t” in these equations, and we just run with that, whether we are in the classical or in the critical tradition. 

That was the rabbit hole for me. Once you understand that taxation falls on property and property rights and all this, like stocks and flows. Taxation is a flow, but it falls on a stock which is property. Then I said, well, I don’t know anything about property and the rest is history. 

Then I said, okay, I really need to understand this. I understood vaguely that, of course, property is a legal category, but what’s the relationship between law and economics? Then I realized, to my horror, as I started studying this stuff that there is an established law and economics tradition which dominates global and national policymaking and critical political economists have nothing as a rebuttal to New Institutional Economics, in particular Douglass North. This is the dominant paradigm, as we know, but I didn’t find any useful critique from the left, except in very broad strokes. They support austerity and central bank independence, but that’s not enough. 

Scott Ferguson 

Those are epiphenomenal in a certain way. 

Jamee Moudud 

Exactly. Also, and you must be knowing this too, Scott, that ever since Alice Amsden’s  book came out in the late 1980s on South Korean industrialization, there’s been huge literature, like Alice Amsden and then Robert Wade  and Ha-Joon Chang about the role of the state in in terms of industrialization. 

This was a challenge to the Washington Consensus. Everybody in the critical political economy tradition, that’s like your baby econ in graduate school. After a while, I became a little tired of listening to the same thing because it was the same incantation about the role of the state. I just started to think that now there’s something incomplete here. 

I mean, I get it, but there are variants of public policies with regard to economic and social development. A lot of this was literature focused on East Asia and this authoritarian period, which, needless to say, I’m not very sympathetic to. But virtually nobody really spoke much to the social democratic versions of these kinds of policies and especially in the postwar period: 50s and 60s. 

This is a time where you have a powerful labor movement and social democratic parties with at least some kind of a commitment to social justice. I felt like there’s something over here that needs to be understood analytically. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what that was. By this stroke of luck 

I came across Martha  McCluskey, whom we all know and admire and Christine Desan. 

Scott Ferguson 

We’ve interviewed her on the show. 

Jamee Moudud 

They really played such an important role in helping me think about the integral role of law with respect to the economy, not just the sideshow aspects of it. Every time I tell a critical political economist that law is kind of important, they say, “yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s important,  but let’s all first of all deal with the economy. Then we deal with law and politics.” I’m like, “no, I don’t think that’s the way to go.” 

Scott Ferguson 

From the point of view of somebody who is trained as a film and media studies scholar, the way you articulate this commitment to law as being constitutive reminds me of certain ways in media studies that scholars will make similar moves. 

They want to imagine that media are constitutive of social reality. So often it’s treated, to use this term again, as epiphenomenal.  

Jamee Moudud 

That’s so interesting. That is fascinating 

Scott Ferguson 

Too often it’s like, what happens when individuals encounter media, rather than how is media shaping and constituting social reality in the first place? Right. Between economics and law, and especially in the orthodox model, you have this kind of premediated origin story where things begin from a place of pre mediation and that’s the economy. Later you can have interventions of the state or law or the legal system. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. I just found that for myself. If you think about three broad intellectual traditions in critical political economy. One would be the Marxist tradition, the other would be the post-Keynesian tradition, and the third would be feminist economics. With the honorable exception of the feminists, the other two really articulate this kind of epiphenomenal view.  

Certainly in the Marxist tradition and Marxist economics, law and politics is part of the base superstructure argument. For the Post-Keynesian (PK) tradition, it’s not that they necessarily say that, but the whole story of the New Deal, for example, which the PK tradition relies so much on and I think in critical political economy, the New Deal plays a very important role both for the Marxists and for the Post Keynesians in that the post Keynesians kind of emphasize all that the state did and for the Marxists, what the state could not do. This is the seesaw effect on both sides. In the meantime, neither side talks about President Roosevelt’s “Brains Trust,” and the fact that these scholars in the brains trust were all lawyers and institutional economists trained in this tradition that I talk about in this book. They were thinking about markets very in a very thoughtful way. It was not just about state intervention or nonintervention, but it was something different. I really, for the life of me, couldn’t figure out why there was this blindness to this way of thinking about politics and economics. The exceptions in critical political economists were the feminists, because, in talking to them, it’s not that they would necessarily deal with this tradition, but they really understood that institutions and the cultures that shape institutions and are shaped by them, play a really central role in market relations. For example, there is this false dichotomy between the market and what happens in the household. 

There was this classic article by…who was it? It was about the unhappy marriage between Marxism and feminism. I think there was an article like that. I think that’s the point, where we focus on class but who are we talking about? Women? Are we talking about black people or are we talking about black women? I mean, like, what are we talking about here? 

It’s very odd. What is determining class, what is determining class’s intersection with race and gender. Then we’re talking about other forms of inequalities. That’s left under theorized. It’s more descriptive. “Oh yeah. We know that there’s racial or gender discrimination, but first of all, let’s deal with the economy and class relations.” 

Scott Ferguson 

Can I ask you – I guess it’s sort of personal – but I think it picks up on the history and the sociology of knowledge and collaboration. How did you stumble upon McCluskey’s work – and you are good friends now. How did this even happen in the first place? 

I will say that, in many ways, I was in my field and subfields for years yearning for – it’s easy for me to say in retrospect – the kinds of things I’m doing now but didn’t really have access. I didn’t even know where to go. It just so happens that some contingent circumstance led to another. 

So how did you make connections? 

Jamee Moudud 

Yeah, that’s an interesting one. It happened through an interlinked series of issues. One was I had co-organized with a colleague a conference at Sarah Lawrence on the Global South with the focus on South Asia, Pakistan, India, and so on. 

Scott Ferguson 

What year was this? 

Jamee Moudud 

This was in 2014. Spring of 2014. We raised some money. It was a really great three-day conference. One of the issues that came up in that conference was the question of taxation on land and property. This came up over and over again. I’m driving home at the end of this conference one night on the highway, and I’m thinking about exactly this question of taxation, which I talked about earlier.  I don’t really get it. 

Property, land and property, do I know property? So, there’s that. That was already getting the mind thinking. I came home and then I had to take my younger daughter, who was little at the time, to dance. I took her to the dance academy, and I’m waiting outside to pick her up, and I’m on my phone and I’m really intrigued. 

My brain is like that line from Dylan, “I’ve got a head full of ideas that’s driving me insane.” Yeah, that’s me. I’m sitting there on my phone. I’m thinking, law…capitalism. Has this been written about? Is this a thing? Chris Desan had been running our program at Harvard Law School on law and capitalism, something like this. 

Her name popped up. When I got to my laptop at home, I just wrote to her and I said, “I don’t think this person will respond.” These people are busy. Who has time to respond? This was late spring. Which professor has time in late spring to respond to a stranger? 

She, very graciously, responded to me within like two days. That was so nice to hear, and I was just really touched. She said, “well, this is really interesting that you’re interested” because I told her a little bit about my interests. She said, “Have you read Robert Hale?” I said, “never heard of him.” 

See, that’s the thing. Never heard of Robert Hale. She sent me Robert Gordon’s “Critical Legal Histories.” This classic paper. She said, “have you read this stuff?” I sat myself down and read it and when I read Hale, there’s that classic article on coercion under a non – coercive state, the 1923 article, “Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-coercive State”. 

I said, “Jeez, this is Adam Smith, this is Marx, this is classical political economy.” We have the formal trappings of equality in a bourgeois democracy, but we have inequality. I said, “oh, but there must be like a gazillion people who’ve written about this.”  So, then I had to go search.  

I studied Sraffa in graduate school, of course, which every self-respecting heterodox economist or critical political columnist does. I said, “oh, there must be literature on Sraffa and Hale or Smith and Hale,” and found nothing. What? So then, through one thing or the other, in my search, I came across the name of David Grewal. Oh, I’m sorry, one more thing. 

We can talk about this later on, I don’t know if you guys have heard about the Cambridge Capital Controversy and the capital critique. Yeah, you’ve heard of that. Okay. I won’t go into that right now, but John Robinson’s classic critique of marginal productivity theory and the production function, and there was this whole debate in which finally, Paul Samuelson in 1966, in a symposium on the Quarterly Journal of Economics, said that John Robinson, you’re right. 

Marginal productivity theory doesn’t work, which raised the question, “Okay, so if the distribution of income between wages and profits is not determined by supply and demand, or “market forces,” then what? Heterodox economics kind of stops there. Right? So, yeah, it’s the institutions. Okay. But that’s fine. So, I said, maybe there’s some law person who’s written about the capital critique. 

It turned out that David Grewal had. He was at Yale Law School at the time. I wrote to him, again, as a totally unknown person. He responded almost immediately, and he put me in touch – he cc’d, I think – Martha McCluskey in that. Then Martha McCluskey wrote to me. 

She wrote to me and she said, “would you like to come to this APPEAL (Association for the Promotion of Political Economy and the Law) workshop,” it’s a two-day workshop at Suny Buffalo Law School. 

“Would you like to come to it and talk about income distribution?” I said, “I’d love to.” I went up there and then Christine Desan  had invited me to, 2- or 3-day event at Harvard. This was around summer of 2014, summer of 2015, this time period, maybe 2015. 

That was when I started to understand law. I understood that this is unexplored, and the law is playing this constitutive role and that law is not neutral, something apolitical, but instead profound. It’s political at its core. I met with Duncan Kennedy. I reached out to him. He reached back. We had coffee together when I went up to Harvard for the first time in 2015. He said, “would you like to have coffee?” I met him at a cafe. It was pouring outside, and he was so gracious. He said afterwards, “Can I drop you to your hotel?” and I said, “no, no, no, I can make it back.”  I make it back in the pouring rain to my hotel. 

He then emailed to say, “Are you okay?” This is so, so kind. In talking to Duncan and to Chris and to Martha and all these other folks, I realized how important politics is to law. Not just important, but it’s integral. It’s the entry point to culture because, whose politics are we talking about? 

I mean, it’s an obvious point, right?  So again, that’s when I began to be very skeptical of the word “state,” because state, used by everybody, implies this monolithic, brooding, omnipotent institution that just barks out orders and does this, that and the other. Of course, that’s not true. 

I mean, I wouldn’t want that to be true anyways, but it’s not even true even in an authoritarian capitalist country. There’s something else going on, which is not about the state. We use that as a shorthand in politics. Then the question is: whose politics? It should be pretty obvious here that we’re talking about a contextually changing political framework which creates the basis of the legal framework of society and that ultimately the economy is – I think it was Roberto Unger and also Abba Lerner who actually talked about institutions as frozen politics in the sense that they are the outcomes of what happens before and that those institutions’ property rights and contracts are an autonomous arena whereby people interact with each other and markets and firms compete and this, that and the other. This is the domain where all economists focus on modeling that economy. 

Whether it be Minsky or Marx’s falling rate of profit or whatever it is. They’re trying to find regularities within or in that economy. That’s the whole story, I think, more or less in the broad Marxist tradition, trying to find patterns within capitalism, which is fine. I’m not disrespecting that, but I think it’s incomplete because they recognize that there are institutional variants of capitalism, but they will also say, “yeah, but there are these patterns that are common.” 

Whether you’re talking about the United States now or 100 years ago or Germany or South Africa or whatever, there are these variants, obviously, but here are these common patterns. Let’s say equalization of profit rates or recurrence of general economic crises. My response comes from that tradition because I was trained as a Marxist economist, but when I started getting into this area of study, I realized I could easily turn that argument around. I could say, “yeah, there are these common patterns, but there are also these variations. And how do you theorize that it’s not just a question of recognizing there are institutional variants of capitalism but analytically understanding this is the question?

That’s where I began to sort of break away from that sort of way of thinking. Move away from that sort of the econo-speak, as it were, to the kind of work that I’ve been doing for the last ten years, which is what we’re talking about right now. That’s a kind of a long-winded response to you, but I think that’s the way I think about this. 

William Saas 

Thank you for sharing your experience. It can be a pretty vertiginous experience to come to those questions the way that you did. The way that you narrate it is so lovely to listen to and then also to kind of identify with because I think that’s the story of a lot of us in this space. We all have been coming to questions that there are no clear disciplinary answers for and having to look into others. 

Once you do, you realize that there is no alternative to interdisciplinarity when it comes to the kinds of questions that we’re asking. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. That’s for sure.  

William Saas 

I identify with you as well, finding ready conversation and camaraderie with a few folks, enough to sustain you into the line of inquiry that you started on. This brings us nicely to your book. I wonder if you could, for our audience, walk us through the kind of big picture moves that you’re making here. 

What’s that story? We’ll probably stop you and chat about different portions throughout, but what’s the story of your book? 

Jamee Moudud 

Okay. First of all, let’s start with the title, which you already gave, but the first part of the title is a play on John R. Commons’ book, Legal Foundational Capitalism. My book’s title is Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism, which is for reasons that we just talked about and as I point out in the intro to the book in the subtitle The End of Laissez Faire? followed by a  question mark, that question mark is probably the most important part of this title and it represents the whole book. 

When I read Keynes’ classic article The End of Laissez Faire with no question mark, in which he said that following the slump of the 1920s we don’t want this 19th century Laissez Faire, we want state intervention. I read it and I said, “no, I don’t agree with you.” 

I’m sorry John Maynard Keynes; I don’t agree with you because it was a heroic rewriting of British economic history. That was really the path forward to the question mark, basically saying that there is no question of ending Laissez Faire either then or now. 

It never existed. It’s like the foundational myth of capitalism. Even the authors on the left will invoke it. 

Scott Ferguson 

Can I quickly interject, I had this kind of moment of revelation. It’s very similar when reading Adorno and Horkheimer for the millionth time over, and they have passages in their work in which they suggest that 19th century European economy was legitimately laissez faire and that, even though it was capitalistic, in a dialectical way there was nevertheless some commitment to individual freedom. 

We have since lost that in the age of monopoly capitalism and I think when I was like 22 years old and reading this in grad school, I would just nod along, right? But at a certain point when I got to these passages, they stuck out and I thought to myself, “no, no, no way, you’re taking the bait.” It was never this way. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. When you were talking, Scott, I was just thinking this is also a heroic rewriting of history by white men. We’re talking about slavery till 1863. What are we talking about over here? Women did not have the right to vote until 1919 in the United States, and I believe 1927 in the UK. 

What are we talking about? Like, are we talking about here? These are authors on the left broadly and they’re arguing like a John Locke saying this is the realm of freedom and then along comes a big bad state.  I decided in writing this book that what I want to do is pursue a method. 

The question of methodology is very important. That method is the bread and butter of all training in programs like the New School, where I got my PhD, or UMass-Amherst or any of these places, which is that theory is constructed in dialog with evidence, including historical evidence, history of economic thought and economic history. This is very different from the deductivist approach of neoclassical economics. I follow that same way of thinking about the engagement of theory with history, but for me, it was legal economic theory and legal economic history. I understood very clearly that you can’t really talk about theory without doing so. I should also mention another person who I owe a lot to, although he’s probably forgotten me. That is Morton Horwitz. I met him. He’s a lovely man. He gave me his folder on a course of economic regulation that he taught for a long time at Harvard Law School. 

I said, “I just can’t figure out where I’m going intellectually” and he said, “Well, take a look at this.” In reading Horwitz was really important for me because you understood going back to the early years of the Republic, property was not discovered, but it was constructed, reconstructed, fought over, and that the judges were not neutral. 

The judges were making policy, as he pointed out over and over again, and thereby distributing power relations within society. In this book, I focus on, first of all, the original institutional economists and the American legal realists as the theoretical launching off point. We can come back to that in a little bit, but I wanted to focus on money, property, as the core aspects of the economy and the business corporation. 

I thought to myself, I want to construct a theory which would weave through the theme of power, because that was what I took away as one of the most important aspects of Hale and all these folks. It’s about the question of power. Then, I wanted to also write about authoritarianism and Hayek. I’d been obsessed with Hayek for a long time. I teach Hayek, yeah. I think you’re smiling.  

Scott Ferguson 

Know your enemy. 

Jamee Moudud 

I totally agree. I teach Hayek in every course, and everybody would think that I’m some sort of a closeted libertarian. I connected that tradition of liberalism to authoritarianism. What I wanted to do was really make this book about an analysis of power in different contexts. In regard to money, for example, one of the first questions I asked myself when I read Desan’s book was, “How does this connect to the endogenous money tradition?”

The endogenous money tradition is what we cut our teeth on. How do you reckon with that? Then it struck me. Hayek really helped me here. Reading Hayek made it very clear that that strand of liberalism conceptualizes a society in pre political terms. 

He says very explicitly that society comes first and that’s where you have law. To his credit, all his writings were on law, but law itself arises spontaneously through some bizarre process that I’m still trying to figure out right after having written this book. It arises through some spontaneous order and the monetary system just arises in that particular way. 

Menger and Hayek come in this tradition. You can situate endogenous money in that approach too because you could just say just “yeah, Banks just figured it out with credit.” I believe there’s a French tradition, in the way that there was this classic debate between the Currency School and the Banking School in England, there was obviously a French equivalent to that. The French authors who were sort of more in line with the banking school were libertarians because they actually saw money just arising.  I said, “no, this can’t be right. This is obviously not true. It’s not even historically true.” 

I argued that, in fact, society is a political community. That changes the story completely because in a society, you can’t really have a society without an institutional framework. You have formal institutions, which is law, and informal institutions, which is language and culture that enmesh with each other. 

On that basis, you have the construction and reconstruction of any society distributing gradations of power within it across race and class and gender and all this and of course, its monetary system. If you come back to the endogenous money tradition, endogenous money is really about profit seeking behavior by banks. All profits seeking behavior, all market behavior, are embedded in this political community. 

Here, Karl Polanyi really helped me a lot also because, money, land and labor are all fictitious, as he puts it, and that laissez faire was planned, as he famously said. Then I understood money is a legal institution that has a political basis.This is shaped by its governance. Is it white folks? Is it colonial power? Is it a so-called neutral set of technocrats sitting in a central bank in a democracy? Whatever it is. That’s really the basis of the institutional hardwiring of the system. That is the basis of rethinking the relationship between economics and politics, which is very different from the libertarian view. 

One final issue was, which you see in the forward to the book by Desan, I have actually conjoined money and property rights. You’ve got property rights people who don’t deal with money and with money, you have people who don’t deal with property rights. 

As a store of wealth, money is property. It’s a particular kind of property that we can exchange. It’s a universal equivalent, but in a particular jurisdiction. If you say that it is property then can you apply Hohfeld to study property, then you can apply Hohfeld to money. 

Scott Ferguson 

They’re both permission structures. 

Jamee Moudud 

Absolutely. Permissions and prohibitions and whatever that may be. It will have regressive consequences. It’ll have progressive consequences, whatever that is. Then you get the variations of capitalism in terms of its monetary system and its property rights across space and time or different national contexts across history. I thought to myself, I don’t want to make this a book just about theory, because, you know, that’s not the way I do things. 

I’m going to give tons and tons of examples to say, “here is a way of rethinking capitalism.” I can give you evidence from not just the United States. I deliberately chose a comparative international historical framework. One of the chapters deals with three constitutions; the US, German and South African constitutions, as a way of thinking about property rights in constitutions. 

Thinking about how constitutional property rights interlink with other aspects of these constitutions and the systems of public finance. I argue that even if you have an elastic supply of public finance, if you’ve got a first-generation constitution, then it’s very hard. There are no economic, social, or environmental rights in the constitutional framework. You can have an elastic public finance, but who is benefiting? On the other hand, if you do have a progressive constitution, but you don’t have an elastic system of public finance, we’re talking about Europe here, then you see there’s a conflict right there. South Africa is a really great case in point. It’s a great constitution and an independent central bank, which is in fact in the constitution of that country. You all know about the discontent in that country for the black majority, 30 years after liberation. There’s this massive amount of inequality where you have a constitutionally protected right to public housing. 

That right by itself means very little if the state’s hands are legally tied in terms of actually creating public housing. Both of these two things are important. Coming back to your question about the themes, this question of monetary hardwiring also constrains policymaking, which also then provides the basis of authoritarianism. Once you say that you can go and just elect whoever you want to, you really cannot do anything about economic and social policies that tends to create, ultimately, the space for far-right politics. It’s easy to scapegoat and all that. One of the chapters deals with this sort of supposedly odd bedfellows, liberal realism, which is extolling the virtues of freedom and liberty, and fascism. What we’re seeing in our current moment is the flip side. I argue in one of the chapters that this seeming innocence of liberalism, of free markets plus democracy, you get where we are today in our current moment, where the Washington Consensus formula has collapsed in some sense. 

Scott Ferguson 

I want to flag some macro stakes that have become clear to me in reading the book and listening to you try to characterize your main moves. Coming back to what most economists and even heterodox economists do, they take, what I would call, a reified vision of the so-called economy as autonomous or quasi autonomous and then try to find what you call patterns. 

We can use the Marxist language of the laws of motion. You’re saying that – and I think we fully agree on this show – you’re missing this whole underlying layer. That whole underlying layer isn’t just a kind of locus of causality that has been foreclosed, but it’s also a locus of contestation and opening that up anew has powerful consequences. 

In my experience, and again, I’m not a heterodox economist, so I can’t fully speak to the field from within it, but I increasingly feel I am not convinced that it is okay to just kind of keep tracking the laws of motion in that rarefied realm, even from a radical leftist point of view, because it because it really is distorting and false. It mischaracterizes tensions and contradictions. It misconstrues what those contradictions are. I think you gave a great example. I think a fundamental contradiction in the constitutional construction of modern nation states is the various ways that literal constitutions construct property and money and the public purse, versus the seemingly progressive or regressive kind of social aims of that Constitution. 

That is a fundamental contradiction that is not legible, certainly not through neoclassical economics, but it’s not really legible in Marxism and it’s not even legible in Keynesianism, at least as it’s normally practiced. This, to me, just cracks open causal foundations, the analysis of phenomena like contradictions and their reverberating effects. Suddenly the so-called economy looks very different because you’re not you’re not approaching it from the same point of view. It opens up new possibilities for transformation. I’m not throwing any particular person under the bus, but I’ve been to several heterodox economics conferences and even critical legal studies conferences and even some of these great money conferences put on by Desan and others. 

Very often a trope will come up when you start bringing up big progressive policies like a federal job guarantee and inevitably, somebody will raise their hand in the audience and say, like, “but is that possible under capitalism?” What does that imply? First of all, we’re not saying it’s easy or that it’ll ever come to pass without a lot of hard fighting and work. 

What that implies is that the hard wiring, so to speak, is so hard wired that the laws of motion might as well be Newtonian and absolute. 

You can’t even, from the left, imagine or fight for or theorize or culturally explore what a job guarantee might even look or feel like or how it might be implemented. You’re not even allowed because we have to self-censor. We have to self-censor because, sorry, the laws of motion do not permit it. 

I think this is one of the central obstacles of left analysis and praxis that your book is opening up. 

Jamee Moudud 

Yeah, I totally agree. It’s interesting that you mentioned Newtonian analysis because I’m working on a new project – this probably is going to be another book – which is about visions of the market. That’s another whole conversation to have. I do think that coming back to that issue, as I point out in the book and I think you said it exactly right, saying that things could be changed for the better doesn’t mean that you just wave a magic wand and boom, it’s going to happen. 

Nobody’s saying that. In terms of theory, I draw a connection between Hohfeld, K. William Kapp , and John Maurice Clark, who actually wrote about social cost theory, that is to say, how corporations and businesses inflict social cost. I argue that, in fact, the extent to which corporations inflict social costs, such as environmental destruction or greenhouse gases, etc., etc., that that’s a function of the bundle of rights that they have. 

What kind of rights are encoded in what a corporation can do? Can it steal your and my data? This next book is going to be on, partly, on artificial intelligence. This conversation that we’re having in this platform, to what extent is a software actually taking our data, etc., that’s not just some neutral market forces. 

The law is enabling certain kinds of actions, which are legal. Saying that social costs could be reduced, that one could constrain tech or one could constrain industry from pumping out greenhouse gases and so on, it’s not that nobody’s going to say that’s easy. In fact, this is where historical analysis was very important. Look at the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. 

Before that, industry had a free hand in dumping as much chemical waste as they wanted. There’s no question that the environmental movement of the 1960s and maybe earlier, too, eventually changed the politics and the culture so that even the Republicans understood that. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to drink contaminated water and smoke and inhale smoke filled air. 

Thanks to landmark environmental policies or the consumer rights movement of the 1970s, we now take seat belts for granted. I always joke to my students, have you ever seen those old cars of the 1950s and 60s? They were death traps and the only safety measures were brakes and doors. How did seatbelts become mandatory? 

Or airbags later on? It came through this massive consumer rights movement, which industry fought tooth and nail against like it fought tooth and nail against environmental policy through the 1970s and 80s. None of these changes really just came about. They came about through a long struggle. You could always say, did they change the laws of motion of capitalism? Maybe not, but did they make the lives of people better? You would not be subject to crippling neck and facial injuries from a car accident like you would be in the 1950s? If you think about global healthcare systems, the fact that we do have universal health care in so many industrialized countries, and the fact that this is possible in the global South also, this is where the question of money comes in. 

Does that make a real difference to people’s lives? I think it would be kind of absurd to evoke the laws of motion of capitalism to get it. Just one more thing that struck me too, many of these changes in a progressive direction, if you look through the factory acts of the 19th century all the way to the 1970s, they happened in good and bad times. Capital was constrained to reduce social costs even when the economy at times was in crises, like the 1970s. 

It’s not quite correct to say that somehow in the final instance, politics has got to obey the laws of motion when the rate of profit has collapsed, there’s really nothing that one can do. That begs the question, how did these important environmental and consumer rights policies get implemented in the 1970s, when, by all accounts, the global economy was in a slump? 

In the case of Germany, the Co-Determination Act of 1976 was enacted, in the case of Italy, I think that they had this very important public health care legislation put in place in ‘78. You see all these anomalies coming up in different contexts in tough times, which I think raises the question. 

How are you thinking about the relationship between politics and economics? Oh, one final one. You remember the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and Thailand was the epicenter. That was 1998. But in 2002, I believe they actually created – I don’t know what the political circumstances were – the national health insurance system. This is a country in the global South. I think it was 2002. I think it was called the “30 Baht program” or Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS)Universal Coverage Scheme (UCS). I think that’s a big deal. I think we need to be cognizant of that as we’re desperately searching for alternatives. 

There are these instances that we need to understand. What are those ways that we can think about these issues? 

Scott Ferguson 

It’s really reminding me of another critical preoccupation I have, which is with critical and left theories of crisis that emerge from this dedication to a certain set of laws of motion. I find that most theories of crisis – it’s not to say that crises don’t occur, of course they occur, they occur all the time – but there’s a kind of necessary mechanical thinking that often creeps in that makes me want to just throw them all out. To come back to this theme, they’re so disabling. I think all these historical examples show us that. 

In the midst of these so-called crises, that’s when you can innovate and rewire the hard wiring toward beneficial ends. 

Jamee Moudud 

One thing that I’ve thought of doing in the book and ran out of space to do, but it would have been a fun thing to do. I think I might do this. Just take one country for which we have a lot of evidence. I don’t know, let’s just take the UK and sort of map various Factory Acts and their social acts. Map them against what Marxists call phases of accumulation and upturns and downturns. It would be a great way to sort of push back at this argument that many of these Factory Acts actually happen with no correlation.  

That’s my basic point. It’s pretty easy to show this. I’ve sort of casually looked at some of this information, but there’s no correlation here. The way one phrases the critique is important, it doesn’t mean that it’s an easy process that you just wave your wand and all that, but there’s a kind of reductionism that somehow in the final instance is the economy. 

In the current moment, when we are facing an existential threat as a civilization because of global heating. I don’t even call it climate change, which is a euphemism. It’s a global heating, an extreme weather. You’ve got powerful sectors of the capitalist class, not just the fossil fuel industry, but all those that benefit from it, like the financial sector, this, that and the other. There’s this interlocked web of power that is preventing what is an existential question now. What are we then as theorists going to say? “Well, okay, let the planet just destroy itself.”  

Scott Ferguson 

It’s the laws of motion! 

Jamee Moudud 

The laws of motion. I kid you not, I’ve actually seen articles coming out by various people about our current crisis and the deep structural problems of capitalist accumulation. I’m going, seriously? I mean, is this where we’re going with the deep structural problem? 

Scott Ferguson 

One of my pet peeves is that when Marxists start citing Larry Summers on secular stagnation, like, come on. 

Jamee Moudud 

Come on. I mean, I don’t know if this is the space to talk about this, but I do think that there is a contradiction in volume one of Capital. 

Scott Ferguson 

Go for it. Where else are you going to talk about it? 

Jamee Moudud 

I didn’t do this in the book. This is the first time that I’m going to do this. I think that Marx contradicts himself. Yeah, I studied Capital and taught it for many years. The contradiction is the following and I think it relates to actually our broader conversation. The first part of volume one, money just comes up. It just arises. 

Scott Ferguson 

Like Hayek, right? 

Jamee Moudud 

Exactly. Hayek and Menger. If you scoot forward in volume one too, I think chapter 31, he sounds like an LPE person. In fact, the bulk of Capital Volume One from bloody legislation to the Factory Acts, which comes earlier on. Then he talks explicitly about money in chapter 31, where he talks about the national debt, remember? There’s a really great passage on the Bank of England and the state’s role and all this kind of stuff. 

There’s a contradiction over what the theory of money is here. I thought, am I going crazy or am I missing something because, does money come up organically or is it the product of politics? I reached out to some Marxist economists, and I will not mention their names here, and I said, is there a contradiction here? 

They said, “Jamee, thank you so much for your email. No, I don’t see the problem.”  

“Why not?”  

“In the beginning of volume one, there is no state. There’s value creation, there’s value theory and then he brings in the state later on. It’s like a level of abstraction story.  

So, I said, “Wait a second. How can you have value creation without property rights? Contracts.” How can you be abstracting from the state in the beginning, you’re basically saying that class relations occur before politics, is that where you are going? Well, what does that even mean? I would much rather go then to the neoclassical side, because to their credit, the distribution of income is determined in the pre political space and marginal productivity theory. Okay fine. We don’t agree with it. I mean it’s a nonsense theory, I agree, but it’s at least consistent. But with Marx, you’re talking about an explicitly class-based analysis of the distribution of income. In which case, how are you possibly then abstracting from politics and law at the beginning of volume one? 

If you’re abstracting from politics and if you bring in politics and law, then that completely changes the theory of money at the beginning of Volume 1. 

Scott Ferguson 

I would say in response, this makes a lot of sense to me. I will also say that, to me, this is a symptom of Marx’s liberalism. You can say that he’s making an immanent critique of liberalism, but I’m not convinced that he achieves escape velocity. 

Jamee Moudud 

With any kind of theorist from the 19th century who’s written in a different language there’s always a question of translation into English. Again, the base superstructure model, which I critique in the book, he didn’t discuss that in his later works in volume one and two and three, but there’s an explicit discussion of that in the earlier Marx. Now, the question is, maybe he changed his mind, whatever it is, but I don’t know. In any case, there’s a clear contradiction that I see here in Volume One. I thought to myself, “I’m going to land myself in such trouble over here,” because he repeats the same trope that competition occurs before Leviathan, as he puts it. Leviathan, being the state. What? Are you saying business competition occurs pre-politically? This idea, as you’re quite right, it actually filters into contemporary economics and on the Marxist side. Not Marxist social and political theorists or historians like E.P. Thompson, who famously debunked the base superstructure. It’s the economists that are the problem. 

Scott Ferguson 

It also informs the humanities as well. 

Jamee Moudud 

You mean the base superstructure? 

Scott Ferguson 

Yeah. I would say that for most humanists, they do not accept a naive base superstructure model. I think they would claim that it’s much more complicated in Marxist texts. Whether they’re thinking this through Althusser or any number of others like the British Cultural Studies School and Stuart Hall. There’s lots of ways of complicating base superstructure. 

I don’t think the humanities has a self-consciously naive base superstructure model, but I would nevertheless say that the problems that we are diagnosed facing are rampant. Even if it’s not a straightforward, naive, binary opposition, top down, it’s nevertheless still operative. 

Jamee Moudud 

Which I think is so strange because some of these cultural theorists have also written about colonialism. When you look at the colonial enterprise, you can clearly see this constitutive role of law. I mean, you can see it everywhere, but I’m just saying that as a way by which common law systems were actually state created and imposed in India and elsewhere. 

These were policies of the state. It’s not that the state came in afterwards. They’re aware of all of this.  I think the strength of engaging with these critical traditions in law is that you really begin to understand that this hardwiring cannot just need to happen and the question about who’s the agent behind the hardwiring and who’s contesting it and how is it contested. 

So, then you sort of change the story around and the analysis around. I think most of these authors, and I guess humanities would have the same issues. They don’t really deal with this critical tradition in law. 

William Saas 

I just keep thinking about Kalecki’s “Political Aspects of Full Employment” in the context of this conversation. I’m wondering if we can figure something out where we come up with a critical thinker quiz that we have people take. Read Kalecki’s “Political Aspects of Full Employment” and tell us what your conclusion is at the end. 

There’s an example of not too many years ago of a popular left magazine publishing something on that; about and around that article that draws the conclusion that political full employment is just not possible. That’s not the lesson. I’m thinking about that because this conversation in your book makes me think a lot about the kind of prescriptions that follow from accepting and inheriting, uncritically, some of these baseline assumptions. 

I would, as an aside, wonder if even accepting them uncritically is too charitable but rather accepting them as a condition of their continued scholarly existence and relevance. So much has been built on the foundations that we’re talking about here that to get to the bottom is a threatening and kind of, again, vertiginous experience. 

Not all of us are into that. Some of the prescriptions or sort of affective attitudes that I think we see flowing from this on the outcomes side is accelerationism. Accelerationism has been implied in some of the things that we’re talking about. 

We’re talking about laws of motion and defeatism and a kind of throwing your hands up precisely in moments of crisis when you need to sort of ditch the realism and get on with something else. Something affirmative and something more in the idealistic space, which is also may be uncomfortable for people who have been steeped in this kind of defeatist political realism. 

I want to put in a word for them, though. Is it not the case we’ve evoked – and this is going exactly the opposite way, maybe it doesn’t work and maybe I’ll edit it out. But the forces that are – and I’m saying forces in quotation scare quotes – are arrayed by law currently so aggressively and are so entrenched. 

Scott Ferguson 

And invisible. 

William Saas 

And invisible and omnipresent that one could forgive them for proceeding in this kind of realist – that isn’t quite so realist, because it’s not attending to things that we’re talking about here, but… 

01;08;09;23 – 01;08;16;27 

Scott Ferguson 

Can you be an LPE pessimist? Is there a place for the LPE pessimism? 

William Saas 

Is there a space? Where does the worst pessimism exist? Yeah. I mean, is pessimism permissible in this space? 

Jamee Moudud 

Okay. All right. That’s a really great question. One of the things that I really struggled with in this book, and I think I did a fairly decent job, is that I didn’t want to say that. I wanted to sort of break away from either an unambiguous, optimistic view – which I don’t believe in – and also this pessimistic view. 

I always tell my students that as a student or a scholar of history, I’m neither a pessimist or an optimist, but I’m a realist. What does that mean? That means that change is possible, but it is hard. It is really hard and it may take a long time. I don’t know where that puts me, but I think I’ve been influenced a lot in my thinking by Wolfgang Streeck, the German sociologist’s really great book Re-forming Capitalism. There’s a dash between Re and forming. In which he talks about the fact that progressive labor legislation, which is what he focuses on in that book, has been pushed back by employers over many decades in favor of them. Kathleen Thelen, a political scientist at MIT, talks about institutional variations and that that’s where the power dynamic shifts in different ways. 

My point here is to simply say that whether or not social costs can be of different kinds and can be reduced, social costs created by capital can be reduced. It’s not obvious that they can be reduced easily. One way to think about this article is to say, well, look at globalization. There’s always this threat of capital flight. That’s real. I think we have to face up to that coming on the left, which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t struggle for these important social rights. But it’s an important issue, right? It’s an important constraint or an important impediment to change. We need to be aware of this and how do we then think about this issue in countries lower down in the international and monetary hierarchy. That’s a real issue. I do think that, for me, the pessimistic part is the threat of capital flight. But then I say to myself, yeah, but that’s always been the case. Capital, even if it doesn’t actually go to some other jurisdiction, can always just invest at home and it can invest in financialization and all the rest of it, which doesn’t create good jobs and such. 

That’s always there. I don’t like to use the word middle ground, because I know that as a connotations built into it, but I’m trying to swim away from either pessimism, which one version of that comes from a kind of an economic reductionism, and the other one is a kind of a Pollyannaish view that you just need the good guys in power and that’s the end of the story. This is something that we haven’t talked so much about in this conversation, but I think it’s sort of popped up a few times. We’ve talked about power, but one of the issues that I’ve dealt with in the book, and I want to explore this more, is language and how that informs the way we think and our belief systems. You could be on the receiving end of this factory dumping chemical waste into the river, but you still believe that there’s something called a free market and that that’s the notion of efficiency. That word “efficiency” is a trope, but it’s a very powerful cultural trope. 

Everybody will talk about market efficiency, even to those who are on the receiving end of the ravages of the market. As long as that belief system remains then the power remains invisible. If you look at the cover of the book, that cover symbolizes something that I’m trying to do over here, that in fact power comes from the invisible ways by which politics has structured economic and social life. We need to, first of all, bring it out of the shadows. Make the invisible hand visible. The visible hand of politics was always behind the so-called invisible. I feel like that’s one important step towards a progressive alternative to sort of break away from state intervention versus nonintervention. The liberals and the progressives will say, “we want more regulation.” Remember, in the wake of, let’s say, the global financial crisis, this was the same standard line. “We need more regulation.” The conservatives would say the opposite. The point is that, leaving aside certain illegalities, the global financial crisis and the subprime mortgage framework was built on the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, an act of Congress, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), 

The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. These were political decisions that created a legal basis for the growth of markets. I feel like people are not aware of something which is staring them in the face and that’s the power and the way by which power is exercised. 

Repeating that is, I think, very important. It’s a key piece of the puzzle. We don’t talk about it enough, this way of thinking about power, at least certainly not in economics. You can’t really talk about economic and social transformation, without, first of all, dealing with this crucial element of power. 

I’m very grateful that I’m having this conversation in this podcast because so much of the work that I see resonates with what I’ve seen my interest go into in this sort of cultural political economy. 

I don’t know if anybody is doing it, but culture is what’s behind the politics, which is behind the law, which is behind the economy. 

Scott Ferguson 

Yeah, and they’re always mixed up together. 

Jamee Moudud 

They are and they always have been. This current moment is nothing exceptional. It’s not at all exceptional. I think the power part is also something which has been around for a long time and has naturalized. You don’t think you can change it. 

Scott Ferguson 

I was going to ask you to speak in a little bit more detail about your analysis of colonial and imperial relations and developments specifically around constitutionality and public finance. This is one of those areas, not that there hasn’t been work done and you quote a lot of important work, and we’ve engaged with some of these authors on our own podcast, but I think this is another one of these areas of blindness, especially in the West. What are the political and legal conditions of possibility for the Global South debt crises, for example. You work through several different examples in the book, and I wanted to give you a platform to just talk a little bit more about that. 

Jamee Moudud 

Just a clarification, are you talking about the colonial period or are you talking about the post-colonial period? 

Scott Ferguson 

Both, but it’s up to you what you want to focus on here. 

Jamee Moudud 

I can do both. In terms of the colonial period, one of the things that I wanted to do was to say, there is this literature, Ha-Joon Chang’s classic book, Kicking Away the Ladder. Then you have Mehrsa Baradaran’s book about money and property.

I forget the book title exactly. She writes about banking and black banking. I thought to myself, when you look at the history of colonialism, one key issue is the way monetary systems were hardwired.I focused on England’s colonies of color versus the dominions such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. 

What I argued was that the way in which colonial systems of finance, public finance, central banking including, were promoted by the British in Australia, for example, or New Zealand, which were also very poor in the 19th century, gave legislatures far greater autonomy to promote economic, social and political development. By the time they become formally independent – I forget if it was the 1940s or whatever – they’re already in a place where, while much poorer compared to European countries, like New Zealand for example, they still have the basis of a pretty decent welfare state and a national health care system in the early 20th century. This freedom was not granted to the colonies of color. South Africa was different because there the South African Reserve Bank was created under the umbrella of the British Empire. Sir Henry Strakosch headed it. Strakosch pointed out that we need an elastic supply of credit to promote industrialization. Of course, that was for white folks, the white minority. The point here is that the design of monetary systems in the colonial period had two different logics and that, I argue, already set the stage for global inequalities way before the 1980s because a lot of the sort of issues of the Washington Consensus and so on tends to focus in the 1980s and 1990s and the debt crisis. But the roots of the problem lay much earlier, so that when many of these countries in the global South gained independence in the 1950s and 60s, they were already in a place, because of the prior way by which their monetary systems were hardwired, that put them way behind other colonies that were granted a better deal by England. 

There you get to at least one important aspect of what causes these roots. I don’t know if it’s an irony or if it is just one of these blindfolds, but when these European countries are industrializing after the Second World War, they pursue pretty sensible policies, including progressive constitutions, progressive use of monetary systems, the Bank of France and such, and the role of public banking of various kinds. 

In the case of Germany, it was this publicly owned bank which is very huge now. The KfW ( Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or Credit Institute for Reconstruction) played a very important role in German reconstruction. This was not an opportunity that existed or was allowed or even in the consciousness of the newly decolonized countries in the global South. 

Part of it may be because many of these – and I’m just speculating over here because this is not something that I studied – leaders or movements that were genuinely popular nonetheless, in the global South, still swung towards being either free market or state socialism. 

These were ill equipped states. You had the same logic of corruption and all the rest of it, which ultimately leads to payments crises and swings towards the so-called free market in the IMF. But what is written out of history is the really crucial ways by which monetary systems were structured in the case of Europe, including the smaller countries in northern Europe, like Sweden and Finland, which have powerful labor movements. 

They pursued industrial and social policies that actually did a pretty good job. Why was this not even in the framework to think about? I think that’s the missing story. 

Scott Ferguson 

There’s so much to say. It affects me even just teaching canonical film studies. When I get to the topic of what’s called third cinema, which is a kind of counter cinema, revolutionary cinema of the 60s and 70s that still has influence today, but its heyday was in the 60s and 70s all across the global South and Latin America and Africa and elsewhere. 

The scholarly framing, but also the polemical framing within the films themselves tells a story of global domination, exploitation and indebtedness without touching this underlying layer and, from my point of view, even from a critical point of view, it naturalizes that underlying layer. 

I’m here to introduce this topic to a film studies class and humanities context. I find myself constantly weighing how much do I want to go down this rabbit hole and how much do I not? Ultimately, we’re here today to learn about film, which is, of course, social and historical and political, but sometimes I do go too far. I start citing alternative work in monetary scholarship, but sometimes it’s not appropriate. I feel really torn even in my own pedagogy that this is such a crucial question that’s just totally ignored. 

Jamee Moudud 

I think part of the problem also, Scott, is that money is a mystery. Money is not something people even think about because it’s just liquid, right? Whereas Desan says it’s blood and it’s always been blood, and it’s created and recreated in different ways, in different contexts with different consequences. 

So that is part of the deeper problem, which is the opacity of economics itself. When you think that the economy and economics is this black box, then it’s easy to say it doesn’t really answer the questions that I’m interested in. I can think of the film studies student in one of their classes saying that “I’m really interested in global inequalities after the Second World War, but I then need to go do something else.” This is opposed to saying you can go into these other things, but here’s the way by which that economic structure was constructed at the end of the Second World War. The nice thing about endogenous money is that you don’t actually have to argue for it, everybody understands that money is integral to the economy. 

The fact that this monetary system was constructed in a particular way that had all these consequences for these countries as opposed to the global north, it can be done but I don’t think it’s necessarily in the consciousness of the way people think about money and economy and inequality. Then it becomes about other issues.  

William Saas 

Well, fantastic. If you had to boil down, as we so often do in blurb form today in our oppressive, omnipresent capitalist system, what’s the central lesson you hope that folks in LPE and in cultural studies and across disciplines, take away from this book? 

Jamee Moudud 

That’s a difficult question, but as you were asking the question, I was thinking, what’s been motivating me in writing this book? In fact, once I fell into this rabbit hole ten years ago, my career has been about understanding power in its different dimensions. I think that’s been an abiding interest of mine. 

This is where you can actually get people or cultural theorists into conversation with other scholars. That’s the connective tissue of the system itself. In the book, I think that theme of power weaves its way through this entire book, at every step of the way. 

Why did I actually deal with property rights and constitutional property rights and colonialism and the far right and Hayek? All these topics have an underlying thread running through them. I think that’s really one key point, which sort of brings you back to the title of the book; both the main title and the subtitle. The theme is understanding inequality, not just narrowly as the distribution of income, but social inequity. 

One thing I do think would be kind of interesting to point out: when I teach my students “Project 2025” I have them read that 900-page mandate, one thing that I want to draw their attention to is how interdisciplinary it is. 

One thing that the far right has revealed to us is that it is profoundly interdisciplinary. From attacks against LGBTQ+ rights to very technocratic discussions about trade policy to labor to environment, this, that and the other, you can see that the way they’re thinking about and the unitary executive theory, which goes back to the physiocrats, that these are enmeshed with each other. 

So, from that standpoint, I think a new left, if you want to put it in that way, has to think about alternatives, challenges and solutions in those interdisciplinary terms and to take those arguments on their own terms. There’s a need to pose these fundamental questions around power because that framework is creating in place a kind of a neo-Victorianism. 

That’s where the conversation for this new, new left has to go. Going back to foundational questions in economics, money and property rights and business cooperation and constitutions and these kinds of things, I think it would be a good place to start. Also, language and culture, and how they are interweaving with each other is where we need to go. 

That’s what I try to do in this book. In the final chapter, which is, towards a political, political economy, like reconstructing economics, I wanted to say that all economics is political economy, including neoclassical economics, because all economics or economic schools of thought have some theory of politics relative to economics. This is as true of Milton Friedman as it is a Friedrich Hayek as it is of anybody that’s Marxist and Post-Keynesian.  A political, political economy asks, “how is that institutional framework even constructed and reconstructed toward emphasizing the politics part to it?” I do think that that’s the way the conversation has to go and sort of try my best to do that in this book. 

Scott Ferguson 

I think that’s a beautiful place to end. Jamee, thanks so much for joining us once again. Everyone should go out and purchase at their favorite retailer The Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire? 

Jamee Moudud 

With the question mark! 

Scott Ferguson 

Yes, with a question mark! This was great. 

Jamee Moudud 

Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun, such a lot of fun having this conversation.

* Thank you to Robert Rusch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.