Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies

Politically charged claims about both capitalism and risk became increasingly insistent in the late twentieth century. The end of the post-World War II boom in the 1970s and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union inspired fervent new commitments to capitalist ideas and institutions. At the same time structural changes in the American economy and expanded industrial development across the globe generated sharpening anxieties about the risks that those changes entailed. One result was an outpouring of roseate claims about capitalism and its ability to control those risks, including the use of new techniques of risk management to tame financial uncertainties and guarantee stability and prosperity. Despite assurances, however, recent decades have shown many of those claims to be overblown, if not misleading or entirely ill-founded. Thus, the time seems ripe to review some of our most basic economic ideas and, in doing so, reflect on what we might learn from past centuries about the nature of both capitalism and risk, the relationship between the two, and their interactions and consequences in contemporary America

Brandeis and the Democratic Vision

1 Mapa, col. Full d'un llibre de B. Picart, Amsterdam, J.F. Bernard, 1723 (Tom. VI, Nº28, pag.110). - Text en francès, 2 mapes i 4 vistes. Datat al 1723 aproximadament.44 x 53 c

The Particularly Dubious Case of Hans v. Louisiana: An Essay on Law, Race, History, and Federal Courts

In a number of striking decisions the Rehnquist Court has limited the powers of Congress and substantially insulated the states from federal authority. In doing so it has repeatedly and explicitly based its jurisprudence on Hans v. Louisiana, an 1890 decision in which the Court held that the Eleventh Amendment barred citizens from suing their own states in the federal courts for money due on the state’s bonds. Hans asserted that the Eleventh Amendment, despite its narrow language, was intended to recognize a broad principle of state sovereign immunity which prohibited all suits against states absent their consent