Capitalism and the Equity Fetish

This book is a provocative, interdisciplinary, and critical appraisal of civil justice, property, and the laws that shape and command them within capitalism. Dr. Herian’s book is both a complementary and countervailing narrative to many mainstream legal accounts, one that critiques core and influential areas of legal knowledge and practice. Central to the book’s thesis is a rich collaboration of ideas and perspectives that consider what is at stake from institutions, concepts, and practices of equity and civil justice tied to the subjective psychic life and the unconscious desires of capitalist stakeholders. The book aims to address several questions, including how capitalism has imagined and shaped equity and civil justice since the nineteenth century; how capitalism acts as a well-spring of desire for forms of justice that wrap-around and sustain complex frameworks of private property power and ownership; and how equity supports agile neoliberal strategies of justice and reason in the twenty-first century.

Dr. Robert Herian is Senior Lecturer at The Open University Law School (UK) and Co-Founder of the Equity and Trusts Research Network. Robert’s research encompasses equity, trusts, and property law; psychoanalysis; legal history; critical theory and philosophy. He lives in Northwest England with his partner, Chloe, and their border terrier, Billy.

Rob Herian’s book breaks new ground in equity. It will become a standard reference point for critical thinking on the jurisprudence of the common law’s peculiar unconscious.

-- Professor Adam Gearey, Birkbeck Law School, University of London

In private law theory Equity is either lauded as a jurisprudence of justice or feared as an anti-liberal jurisprudence undermining law and economy alike, while in critical legal theory Equity has largely been overlooked. Dr Herian’s ground-breaking Capitalism and the Equity Fetish is the first sustained critique of Equity’s contribution to and intensification of capitalism, and thereby subverts existing positions on Equity in private law theory and marks the first major analysis of Equity drawing on the critical legal canon. Bringing the resources of critique, particularly the insights of psychoanalysis via Marx and Freud, to bear on Equity and essential questions civil justice in the context of neoliberal capitalism, Dr Herian argues that there is such a thing as an Equity fetish, a psychological effect aimed at achieving ‘complete justice’ within a capitalism, a desire that can never be fulfilled. Capitalism and the Equity Fetish is a tour de force, weaving together legal and economic history and theory with psychoanalysis and political economy; the books contains insights and ideas that cannot be found in the existing literature on Equity and is essential reading for lovers and critics of Equity alike.

-- Nick Piška, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Kent and co-founder of the Equity & Trusts Research Network