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Biopolitics of Transnational Private Law – Sovereign Debt Crises, Market Order and Human Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

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A market economy is not a product of free economic behavior but rather, of an order requiring the fulfillment of systemic tasks by market operators. Their performance needs to be guided by rules imposing competition as a political tool to functionalize their action, in such a way that market failures can be avoided. This is not only the case for coordinated market economies, typically making use of direct market regulations, but also for liberal market economies, even if these latter ones prefer an indirect regulation of economic life, by having to condition individual behavior. Different modes of regulation may be used to stabilize the same accumulation regime, which is understood as patterns of production and consumption reproducible over a long period. In other words, liberal market ideology, as well as liberalism, is anything but a theory on unlimited freedom: it “needs freedom”, but also needs to “consume” this freedom as a condition of historical and social possibilities for a free market economy. Even if differences may involve the way of assuring those possibilities, the necessity to force economic behavior into functionalizing schemes must be seen as unavoidable.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by German Law Journal GbR 

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