The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality

Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.

In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital -- and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations -- assets that exist only in law.

-Publisher's Description

Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism

Masculinity, Labour, and Neoliberalism (Charlie Walker & Steven Roberts eds., Palgrave Macmillan 2018).

This book explores the ways in which neoliberal capitalism has reshaped the lives of working-class men around the world. It focuses on the effects of employment change and of new forms of governmentality on men’s experiences of both public and private life. The book presents a range of international studies―from the US, UK, and Australia to Western and Northern Europe, Russia, and Nigeria―that move beyond discourses positing a ‘masculinity crisis’ or pathologizing working-class men. Instead, the authors look at the active ways men have dealt with forms of economic and symbolic marginalization and the barriers they have faced in doing so. While the focus of the volume is employment change, it covers a range of topics from consumption and leisure to education and family.

- Publisher's description

Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America

J.L. Anderson (Mount Royal University), Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America (West Virginia University 2019).

Pigs are everywhere in United States history. They cleared frontiers and built cities (notably Cincinnati, once known as Porkopolis), served as an early form of welfare, and were at the center of two nineteenth-century “pig wars.” American pork fed the hemisphere; lard literally greased the wheels of capitalism. 

J. L. Anderson has written an ambitious history of pigs and pig products from the Columbian exchange to the present, emphasizing critical stories of production, consumption, and waste in American history. He examines different cultural assumptions about pigs to provide a window into the nation’s regional, racial, and class fault lines, and maps where pigs are (and are not) to reveal a deep history of the American landscape. A contribution to American history, food studies, agricultural history, and animal studies, Capitalist Pigs is an accessible, deeply researched, and often surprising portrait of one of the planet’s most consequential interspecies relationships. 

- Publisher's description