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The Myth Of "Privatization", Christopher L. Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The very large body of recent scholarship on the phenomenon of American 'privatization', which means roughly the performance of some seemingly public function through a non-state instrumentality, and which is purportedly very new and very important, suffers from certain problems. Not least of these is that 'privatization' appears not to exist. Or, more accurately, this phenomenon, which is said both to be important in itself and the chief symptom of the changing new order of governance under which we now live, is in fact a thin sliver of relevant reality, at best. Indeed, privatizing talk takes as a given a …