Review of Property, Power and Politics: Why We Need to Rethink the World Power System. Jean-Philippe Robé. Bristol University Press, 2020

Abstract

Property, Power and Politics: Why We Need to Rethink the World Power System stands as one of the most ambitious contributions by French jurist Jean-Philippe Robé to contemporary debates on the relationship between law, economy, and power. The book reconstructs the legal architecture underpinning global capitalism and argues that it should be understood as a World Power System composed of two intertwined dimensions: state sovereignty and private property prerogatives. Robé shows that the expansion of corporate capitalism has produced a structural disconnection between the economic and the political spheres, giving rise to a plural order of public and private powers that combines democracy and despotism. This review examines how Robé’s thesis redefines the legal status of property and the corporation, and discusses the analytical potential of his approach for a socio-legal understanding of the normative life of economic organizations. In a world marked by growing corporate concentration and democratic fragility, Robé’s work emerges as a major theoretical-legal intervention to rethink the normative architecture of contemporary capitalism.