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Amalia D. Kessler, Alessandro Stanziani. Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective, Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Page 922, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.922
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Alessandro Stanziani's Rules of Exchange is an admirably ambitious and largely successful book that seeks to reframe prevailing conceptions of the relationship between law and market in the formation of the modern capitalist state. Focusing primarily on France, but also briefly exploring such countries as Italy, Germany, England, and the United States, Stanziani undertakes a series of chronologically ordered case studies—including such topics as shops, trademarks, speculation, and unfair competition—to show that law has played a vital role in market formation throughout the West. Drawing on new institutional economics, he rejects both the neoclassical position that markets flourish in the absence of regulation and the Marxist claim that law simply reflects market relations. But while new institutional economics has focused largely on identifying legal rules and institutions that minimize transaction costs and thereby promote efficiency, Stanziani emphasizes that—as a matter of actual historical development—there is no clear linkage between the evolution of modern Western legal systems and the goal of promoting market efficiency. To the contrary, he insists, the law that regulates capitalist practice today was primarily a product of politics—of particular groups seeking to promote their interests within existing social, institutional, and cultural constraints. These interests ranged from such self-serving goals as trying to keep competitors out of the market to more public-minded aspirations like attempting to guarantee a sufficient supply of healthful meat at a given price to urban populations. But, however far-ranging, “the aim was not to maximise efficiency and minimise costs nor thwart the imperfections of the market” (p. 69).
