Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.

In modern capitalist societies, the executives of large, profit-seeking corporations have the power to shape the collective life of the communities, local and global, in which they operate. Corporate executives issue directives to employees, who are normally prepared to comply with them, and impose penalties such as termination on those who fail to comply. The decisions made by corporate executives also affect people outside the corporation: investors, customers, suppliers, the general public. What can justify authority with such a broad reach? Political philosopher Christopher McMahon argues that the social authority of corporate executives is best understood as a form of political authority. Although corporations are privately owned, they must be managed in a way that promotes the public good. Public Capitalism begins with this claim and explores its implications for issues including corporate property rights, the moral status of corporations, the permissibility of layoffs and plant closings, and the legislative role played by corporate executives. Corporate executives acquire the status of public officials of a certain kind, who can be asked to work toward social goods in addition to prosperity. Public Capitalism sketches a new framework for discussion of the moral and political issues faced by corporate executives.

Through an examination of the judicial, legislative, and political aspects of the antitrust debates in 1890 to 1916, Sklar shows that arguments were not only over competition versus combination, but also over the question of the relations between government and the market and the state and society.

Problems associated with cronyism, corporatism, and policies that favor the elite over the masses have received increasing attention in recent years. Political Capitalism explains that what people often view as the result of corruption and unethical behavior are symptoms of a distinct system of political economy. The symptoms of political capitalism are often viewed as the result of government intervention in a market economy, or as attributes of a capitalist economy itself. Randall G. Holcombe combines well-established theories in economics and the social sciences to show that political capitalism is not a mixed economy, or government intervention in a market economy, or some intermediate step between capitalism and socialism. After developing the economic theory of political capitalism, Holcombe goes on to explain how changes in political ideology have facilitated the growth of political capitalism, and what can be done to redirect public policy back toward the public interest.

In The Corporation, Law and Capitalism, Grietje Baars offers a radical Marxist perspective on law, tracing the corporation from colonial times to the present multinational. ‘Corporate accountability’ is shown to be a red herring in the struggle for another world.

Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains as their point of departure and base of comparison. There is no imperfection without perfection. In Capitalism, Anwar Shaikh takes a different approach. He demonstrates that most of the central propositions of economic analysis can be derived without any reference to standard devices such as hyperrationality, optimization, perfect competition, perfect information, representative agents, or so-called rational expectations. This perspective allows him to look afresh at virtually all the elements of economic analysis: the laws of demand and supply, the determination of wage and profit rates, technological change, relative prices, interest rates, bond and equity prices, exchange rates, terms and balance of trade, growth, unemployment, inflation, and long booms culminating in recurrent general crises. In every case, Shaikh's innovative theory is applied to modern empirical patterns and contrasted with neoclassical, Keynesian, and Post-Keynesian approaches to the same issues. Shaikh's object of analysis is the economics of capitalism, and he explores the subject in this expansive light. This is how the classical economists, as well as Keynes and Kalecki, approached the issue. Anyone interested in capitalism and economics in general can gain a wealth of knowledge from this ground-breaking text.