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Provides the central theoretical and analytical framework of the book. It includes an extensive review of the regulatory literature, which largely casts the European Union as analogous to a ‘regulatory state’ since it engages in widespread social and economic regulation to promote economic integration. Different theories of regulation—interest group, public interest, and public choice—are examined in order to understand current developments in European political economy. Although most accounts of regulation, often cited in the American context, have highlighted the impact of industry influence or ‘regulatory capture’, such a static view of the public–private relationship diverts attention away from other types of organizational relations. Private organizations assuming governmental functions are well known in Europe, whether it is self‐regulation, corporatism, or private interest government. Applying insights from both the European and American literature, this chapter highlights the importance of understanding the origins, practice, and consequences of regulation for broader issues of democratic governance, legitimacy, and accountability.

This chapter begins by explaining why the complexity of health-related science often makes it susceptible to manipulation. It then shows what some special interests do when they literally “buy” private-interest science through front groups, think tanks, and “hire education” (“hire education” refers to industry funding of academic research that serves its corporate goals). The chapter surveys how private-interest science is done — with incomplete data, contraindicated models, inadequately sensitive tests of pollution damage, and so on. Finally, the chapter shows how and why private-interest science often leads to death, injury, and flawed ethics.

This chapter explains why investor-state arbitration is often wrongfully likened to international commercial arbitration among private parties. Investor-state arbitrations involve not only private business interests but also public policies of the host state and citizen rights. Arbitral awards on investor-state disputes risk lacking credibility and democratic acceptability if they overrule, in non-transparent proceedings, democratically legitimate government decisions on grounds of investor-state contracts. Similar to the introduction of appellate review in the GATT/WTO dispute settlement system, the transparency, legitimacy, and legal coherence of investor-state arbitration could be enhanced by introduction of an appellate instance.

This chapter examines the development of copyright in Russia, focusing on one aspect of the debates—the balance of the private interests of the author (as a producer of material and immaterial values) and the interests of society. These debates involved people of different professions—lawyers, journalists, economists, publishers, and literary critics—and encompassed a wide range of problems—cultural reform and Russia's backwardness, the role of intellectual capital in social development, the value of individual freedom, the state's role in the provision of cultural goods, and the importance and protection of private property. It shows that Russian discussions of copyright often masked attempts to provoke significant political and cultural shifts.

This chapter provides a detailed comparison of the doctrines of forum non conveniens as applied in the four common law jurisdictions considered in Chapters 2-5. It reviews the basic requirements of the doctrine in each country and catalogues similarities and differences dealing with the requirement of an available alternative forum, allocation of the burden of proof, consideration of private interest factors, levels of trail court discretion, the ability to impose conditions on a stay or dismissal, and the treatment of foreign plaintiffs.

Integral to the dialogue’s effort to develop a defense of justice that is not only theoretically consistent but genuinely persuasive are the repeated challenges by Socrates’ interlocutors that he explain how his model lines up with reality. In particular, Socrates must develop a fuller account of the Kallipolis’s policies and practices for channeling eros to beneficial political ends. For Socrates, it is imperative that the founders of this theoretical city constitute guardians in a way that eliminates any conflict between private interest and public interest in the guardian class. This elimination of private interest requires the control of eros and a careful and continuing attention to the cultural narratives that shape and direct both desire and thumos (spirit) in the city’s guardian class.

Chapter two turns to the earliest phases of market-making in British North America. When America's European invaders tried to apply their models of market management to the unfamiliar territory and its people, their efforts frequently foundered on the rocky shores, or languished in the wooded glades, of this expansive and unknowable landscape. Our story of the fate of the early modern market in America must therefore begin with a thorough exploration of the encounter between existing economic assumptions and the colonization process. In other words, before we can inquire into the creation of European-style marketplaces in America, we need to find out what happened when colonists arrived to discover nothing that looked like a marketplace to them, and few people who shared their vision.

Chapter 5 begins by describing the prevailing theories of government regulation. The chapter shows that economically based, private interest theories of regulation, such as public choice or social choice analyses, are insufficient to describe a vibrant democratic state. Thus, the chapter continues the neoliberal critique by demonstrating how neoliberal ideology, which was intended to be an economic argument, was transformed into a debilitating antigovernment political ideology. Neoliberalism can be reduced to two points. First, free markets are good; second, big government is bad. As a result of its antigovernment platform, neoliberalism is responsible for a multitude of government failures ranging from economic inequality to environmental disruption and from increasing poverty to an increase in rent seeking by a favored few economic actors. The chapter discusses these multiple failures in terms of various examples of regulatory capture.

This chapter considers the intricate relations between the public interest embodied by host states and the private interest of foreign investors. While international investment law is often conceived of as favouring investors’ interests at the expense of public interest, the chapter argues that due consideration has always been granted to public interest in this regime and that public interest is likely to play an increasing role in the future. From that perspective, this chapter analyzes the relations between public and private interests both in states’ treaty practice and arbitration practice. More precisely, it explains how conventional practice can be viewed as crystallizing a balancing between public and private interests and examines the tools that are available to arbitration tribunals to balance these interests. In this respect, the chapter discusses the notion of legitimate expectations, proportionality, precedent, and jurisprudence constantes

This chapter argues that tort theorists’ conception of tort remedies is belied by several considerations. The first is that compensatory remedies are usually inadequate as compensation for the setbacks suffered by victims, which implies that they do a poor job of correcting for wrongs. The second is the routine practice of awarding extra-compensatory remedies that either are punitive or have punitive elements. According to this chapter, while sometimes tort law’s remedial responses to wrongs reflect the purely private interests of the victim, it is also important to recognize that they sometimes reflect matters of public interest, too. For these reasons, the chapter argues that one should replace the narrow conceptualization of tort remedies as “private responses” to injurious wrongs and replace it with a wider conceptualization of remedies as “substantive responses” to many-faceted wrongs.

This chapter looks at the conditions which led to the rationalization of the patronage bureaucracies, and the creation of modern merit-based civil service systems. The process of rationalization of public bureaucracies in the nineteenth century was meant to replace patronage with merit as the basis for selection on the assumption that the pursuit of private interest by bureaucrats would be eliminated. In other words, the ‘publicness’ of public bureaucracies was sought to be achieved. The merit-based system put in place four sources of motivation—meritocracy, rewards, control systems, and organizational identification—which were supposed to help separate the civil servant from the pursuit of his private interest. This chapter also provides commentaries on Max Weber's definitional model of bureaucracy and his efficiency claim.

Low and declining levels of trust in politicians, prompted in part by perceptions that they are too often to be found engaged in corruption and other forms of wrong-doing has in recent years turned corruption itself into a high-profile political issue. Against this background, the chapter considers what political corruption is, or might be, for the study of anything requires having a clear understanding of its nature. Then it discusses the different types of corruption to be found, and finally it says something about why their study might be important. The chapter argues that, understood as the adulteration of public by private interests, corruption is a relatively modern notion; suggests that it is possible to distinguish between four types of corruption understood in principal-agent terms, and makes the case that corruption is, as an object of study, important for its incidence and its effects.

Parental choice and market-driven schooling are not new phenomena in the US. The book explored ways society balances public and private aims of schooling, asking: whose education is it? How much innovation do we encourage, and what kind of accountability? And what role do we seek for schools in building an inclusive, equitable society? Today certain types of choice (charter schools and vouchers) are more available, amid expanded requirements and prescribed curricula. Moreover, distribution of options is unequal across regions and families. Coordinated corporate and philanthropic involvement affects increasing options available to families, their distribution across class and race, and opportunities children have to pursue a suitable path. It is inaccurate to present policy options for school choice as either neoliberal vision of choice or progressive backing of public education. Indeed, discussing individual family ‘choice’ obscures the need to make collective choices and seek balance between public and private aims. We conclude that parents should have a say in children’s education – and not just in selecting schools – but they cannot accomplish this alone, and thus the landscape of school choice should be subject to greater public oversight, planning and collective effort to make up our minds about education.

Chapter 5 analyses structural developments and the place of religion in the current Irish education system. It also gives an overview of contemporary debates on the denominational and segregated nature of the system. Despite significant religious decline (both in terms of numbers and social influence), the Catholic Church has managed to retain control over the vast majority of Irish schools. While it is now prepared to accept the transfer of some schools to other patrons, it has in the main tried to maintain its influence, developing a discourse of inclusiveness. Teacher and parent organisations and other educational actors have been voices for change (with public opinion polls also showing support for significant change), in contrast to the political mainstream. Even if there have been differences of political inflexion, with an attempt since 2010 at encouraging a diversification of patrons in the name of ‘parental choice’, the Irish State has kept to its historical role as funder of schools managed by private patrons, the current result being a perpetuation of the system along with a relative increase in the number of Educate Together schools especially, raising the issue of a new form of segregation.

This chapter analyzes the policies implemented by National City Lines (NCL), the debates about the PTC going public, and the process that created today's Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). NCL's policies created much distress for Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) employees, Philadelphia residents, and Democratic political leaders, such that by 1963, liberal politicians and their supporters realized that private control of this vital public service was no longer tolerable. That year they set in motion plans to purchase PTC and transform it into a publicly run regional system, SEPTA. The chapter highlights how private interests extracted what value they could from an industry and then turned it over to public management after it had been stripped of its parts and was no longer profitable.

Beginning with the American legal case of Simonsen v. Swenson (1920), in which a doctor was sued by a patient because of unauthorized disclosure of an infectious disease, this chapter examines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on a duty of physicians to notify syphilis and other venereal diseases to the health authorities and to warn contact persons. In the USA as well as in Britain and Germany a basic conflict existed between an individual, private interest in secrecy and a public interest in disclosure in order to prevent the spread of infection. There was, however, also a widely used public interest argument for keeping socially stigmatizing conditions such as syphilis secret, because breaches of confidentiality in this area would deter patients from consulting a doctor, to the detriment of public health. There was particular concern over the introduction of venereal infections into marriage. While the USA and Germany introduced obligatory notification of venereal diseases under specific conditions, Britain followed a policy of providing free and confidential care in special VD treatment centers.

Chapter 6 discusses current structural trends in the education system from the perspective of inclusion, civic and social equality, looking at the diversification of school types and the involvement of private interests and their consequences in terms of school segregation, continuing discrimination and the issue of democratic legitimacy in the whole system. Until now the Irish State has worked to preserve legal forms of discrimination through exemptions to equality legislation, ultimately subordinating the rights of all individual members of the school community to those of particular groups (mainly religious bodies) acting as private patrons, with the exception of the Education and Training Boards. The human rights of children, including the right to freedom of conscience, have been ignored by the Irish State, despite calls from various United Nations Committees and from local groups to eliminate all discrimination in admission policies and within schools. Competing understandings of the notion of community (cultural/religious vs local) along with the market-based idea of parental choice, have contributed to maintaining school segregation along religious, social and even indirectly ‘racial’ lines, going against the idea of a local common school for all children upheld notably by the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation.

Chinese socialist peasant writer, Hao Ran (1932-2008), was well-known for his novels, Bright Sunny Sky and The Great Road of Golden Light, and remained the best-selling author during the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976). This essay focuses on his less-studied short stories, all but one published between 1958 and 1960. Through a discussion of the politics of his revisions of his early stories, the essay argues that, far from being simplistic transmissions of a socialist ideology, these stories are often unintentionally complicated representation of gender, class, desire, and sexuality in China’s “socialist construction” era. As the Cultural Revolution represents a climax of the epic socialist battle against si, a word that encompasses a wide range of meanings from selfishness and self-interest to anything personal and private, the pruning and clipping performed by Hao Ran to his early stories are ultimately paralleled by the violence committed within a text. The last part of the essay analyzes a story written at the end of the Cultural Revolution period, which demonstrates a discursive structure of violence and embodies the obsessive quest for transparency and the spiritual violence of the Cultural Revolution itself.