Legal Imagination and International Power: A History of Capitalism

• Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies

The 16th edition of the Max Weber Fellow June Conference features a keynote lecture by Professor Martti Koskenniemi.

The talk is based on Professor Martti Koskenniemi's recent work To The Uttermost Parts of the Earth. Legal Imagination and International Power 1300-1870 (Cambridge 2021). In the talk he will argue that the exercise of power by and within European nations has been based on the acceptance and employment of two types of legal justification: sovereignty and property.

Moreover, he will argue that history shows how those two legal notions have organised their relationship in specific ways to respond to whatever contingencies ambitious actors (theologians, lawyers, political and social thinkers, merchants and philosophers) have wished to respond. Sovereignty and property are the yin and yang of European power as it developed from the feudal and and absolutist moments towards what we today colloquially address as "capitalism." Professor Koskenniemi's interest in the talk is to demonstrate the legal origins of economic thinking.