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The Culture Of Financial Institutions: The Institution Of Political Economy, David A. Westbrook

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Integrity, Risk and Accountability in Capital Markets: Regulating Culture, Justin O'Brien & George Gilligan, eds.

The 19th century legal historian Henry Maine famously defined progress, and by extension, liberal modernity, as the substitution of relations based on status (especially family and title), to relations based on contract, especially trade and employment. The article suggests that Maine's assertion, however comforting as a political matter, simply does not hold with regard to the credit relations central to contemporary society. Credit transactions, even retail transactions, are based on trust and interlocking webs of obligation across agents (until recently …