ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the current state of left-wing thinking on the law of contract. Deakin and Frank Wilkinson discusses the capabilities approach in relation to labour law and in relation to the single market. Deakin takes up the issue of the implications of the capabilities approach for the autonomy of the economic actor. The chapter aims to determine whether it is 'possible to identify the elements of a new concept of capacitas, one that goes beyond purely formal guarantees of market access, to encompass the conditions needed for effective participation in the complex economic orders which characterise our time'. A market economy that will actualize the promise of formal, legal equality must, then, be underpinned by institutions that justly distribute social conversion factors and so furnish economic actors with the capability to enter into exchanges to their advantage. The core of modern welfare economics is an attempt to distance those economics from utilitarianism.
