Legal Polycentrism and Contractarianism

Mutual Advantage Contractarianism and Future Generations

MUTUAL ADVANTAGE CONTRACTARIANS TRY to show that moral principles are best understood as rational limitations on our choices. These limitations are derived from non-moral principles of rational choice. To act rationally would thus be to act morally and vice versa. Consequently, there would be no conflict between individual utility maximisation and morality. The main advantage of this project is...

Stakeholders and Takeovers: Can Contractarianism be Compassionate?

The issue of what, if any, purchase non-shareholder corporate constituencies (that is, employees, creditors, suppliers, customers, and communities) should have on the discretionary decisions of corporate management has proved to be one of the most durable, if not vexing, issues in modern corporate scholarship. Most recently, the issue has resurfaced in the context of the takeover wave of the 19...

Robert Sugden Contractarianism as a Broad Church

I defend the claim, made in a previous paper, that ‘a Humean can be a contractarian’, against the criticisms of Anthony de Jasay. Jasay makes a categorical distinction between ‘ordered anarchy’ (which he associates with Hume) and ‘social contract theory’. I argue that Hume’s political position was conservative, not anarchist. On Hume’s analysis, a convention is an implicit agreement; the concep...

Polycentrism in Global Health Governance Scholarship

Drawing on an in-depth analysis of eight global health networks, a recent essay in this journal argued that global health networks face four challenges to their effectiveness: problem definition, positioning, coalition-building, and governance. While sharing the argument of the essay concerned, in this commentary, we argue that these analytical concepts can be used to explicate a concept that h...

Institutional Polycentrism, Entrepreneurs’ Social Networks, and New Venture Growth