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Stakeholders of Capitalism

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Capitalism and the Equity Fetish

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Abstract

Stakeholders accrue and protect personal wealth and property, and establishes bases of power, through use and reliance on the doctrines and principles of Equity, civil justice, and private property, including the law of trusts, contractual remedies, and the law of fiduciaries to undertake economic activity within capitalism. Frameworks of civil justice enable stakeholders to operate commercially and engage financially, including personal asset management, exchange and transaction. Equity’s development from the nineteenth century onwards shows the command economics has over law within capitalism. Law is beholden to economic reason and this manifests in a variety of ways explored in this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Given the parity of dates, Marx’s view of mercantilism can usefully be compared to Michael Lobban’s reference to the significant influence on and ‘major role’ of ‘the mercantile and trading community’ in law reform during the nineteenth century (Lobban 2004, p. 567).

  2. 2.

    For example: Posner (1986) (law and economics); J.E. Penner (1997) (the lawyer); John E. Roemer (1996) (the economist).

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  1. Law School, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Robert Herian

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Herian, R. (2021). Stakeholders of Capitalism. In: Capitalism and the Equity Fetish. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66523-4_5

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