Contracting the Commonwealth: John R. Commons and Neoliberal Financial Crises

This essay adapts Commons’s model of the legal foundations of capitalism to the peculiar circumstances of the neoliberal era. So doing provides a lens for seeing the steady erosion of state capacity to protect the commonwealth, even in nations with hegemonic currency. Our focus here is on the links between the “triple crisis” of the 1980s and the subprime and foreclosure crisis of the 2000s. We show how Brady bonds, after being used to resolve the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s, provided a governing contractual context for subprime lending, and as such constrained the capacity of the U.S. government to respond to a crisis that preyed on the vulnerable, undercut community life, and contracted the commonwealth.