ABSTRACT

Our chapter asks what sociology can contribute to understanding globalization and its strong identification with US-produced governing expertise in law and economics. The starting point is the relationship between the national and the international. Competition between states involves efforts to impose a governing expertise and model of legitimate government. As Bourdieu showed with respect to the international circulation of ideas:

International fights for domination … find their surest basis in the fights at the heart of each national field, internal fights in which the national definition (dominant) and the foreign definition are put into play, as much arms as the stakes.

(Bourdieu 2002: 8) Globalization is the continuation of national confrontations, under the pretension that the national embodies universal values. Our chapter therefore begins with the relationship of law, the reproduction of hierarchy, and state at the national level within the European imperial powers, and then shows how such relationships were exported and imported through colonial processes. The chapter then turns to the US imperial approach that ascended especially after World War II, centred on corporate lawyer-statespersons closely connected to the US state, the leading corporations, philanthropic foundations, elite private law schools and markets in expertise. As in our other work, we rely on interconnected histories and a commitment to go beyond professional categories such as lawyers, and we focus on social capital as a key to understanding the social and political struggles around fields of state power and processes of elite reproduction.