Reconciling Democracy and Capitalism: The Transition to General Laws in the US and Beyond
We usually consider it progress when a country begins to move from an autocratic to a democratic form of governance. However, the introduction of elections and other early trappings of democracy often has the perverse effect of exacerbating political instability. It also increases the incentives for those in power to manipulate the economy for political ends and thus often negatively affects economic growth. We argue that the key to getting beyond these pernicious effects—to reconciling democracy and capitalism—is to shift to a governance structure based on impersonal rules that apply in the same way to everyone (or at least to broad categories of everyone). We lay out the theoretical basis for this argument and illustrate it with evidence about how the transformation worked in the case of the US. All the rich capitalist democracies in the world today went through a similar transition, but for most countries comparatively little is known the process of change. An important aim of this project is to stimulate research on this question.
Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Stanley B. Resor Professor Emeritus of Economics and Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University, Senior Research Scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins in 1979 and taught at Brown, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yale. She has written The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895-1904 and Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England, edited nine other books, and published numerous articles on business, economic, and financial history. Her current research interests include business organizational forms and contractual freedom in the US and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the public/private distinction in US history, state constitutional changes mandating general laws in the nineteenth-century US, and the US Patent Office as a site of learning in the administrative state.
About the event
This event is part of Creative IPR and History of Capitalism's series of open seminars. The research group and project hosts open seminars on the last Monday of every month. This is a public research seminar bringing together researchers and other professionals from across the social sciences, law, the humanities and beyond to present their research or field of expertise followed by a Q&A session.