ABSTRACT
The dominant juridical and political dimensions of governance in the present-day global political economy is “the new constitutionalism of disciplinary neoliberalism.” It corresponds to an attempt to create a “stark utopia” on a world scale: a political project to institutionalize the self-regulating market system undertaken in the nineteenth century and carried out by the capitalist ruling classes in England (Polanyi 1975). At the turn of the millennium there is a similar moment involving a type of counterrevolution of the powerful against the weak, intended to reconstitute the state and capital to reorder social relations on a world scale. A re-extension of the rights of private property and its prerogatives in processes of commodification is occurring, leading to intensifications in the discipline of capital in social relations (what I call disciplinary neoliberalism). This also involves imposition of constitutional and quasiconstitutional legal frameworks that reconstitute the state (new constitutionalism). New constitutional frameworks also shape the operation of strategic, macroeconomic, microeconomic, and social policies. These frameworks are central constitutive mechanisms of the dominant political project of globalization.
