Privatization and Its Discontents
Infrastructure, Law, and American Democracy

Analyzes infrastructure across American history with special emphasis on the legal and economic ideas that shape infrastructure politics.

Matthew Titolo (Author)

9781108468763, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 June 2023

450 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.36 kg

'The subject and problem of infrastructure - newly discussed in law under rubrics like networks, platforms, and utilities - has never been more interesting, salient, and urgent. In this context, Matthew Titolo's sweeping new interdisciplinary history could not be more welcome. Ranging from Adam Smith's theories of police and public works to Joe Biden's Infrastructure, Investments, and Jobs Act, Privatization and Its Discontents provides an invaluable interpretive roadmap to the central questions, frameworks, and transformations that have long preoccupied this all-important field of public-private governance. Titolo's synthetic history is an indispensable resource for re-thinking infrastructure in the 21st century.' William J. Novak, Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School

In Privatization and Its Discontents, Matthew Titolo situates the contemporary debate over infrastructure in the long history of public–private governance in the United States. Titolo begins with Adam Smith's arguments about public works and explores debates over internal improvements in the early republic, moving to the twentieth-century regulatory state and public-interest liberalism that created vast infrastructure programs. While Americans have always agreed that creation and oversight of 'infrastructure' is a proper public function, Titolo demonstrates that public–private governance has been a highly contested practice throughout American history. Public goods are typically provided with both government and private actors involved, resulting in an ideological battle over the proper scope of the government sphere and its relationship to private interests. The course of that debate reveals that 'public' and 'private' have no inherent or natural content. These concepts are instead necessarily political and must be set through socially negotiated compromise.

Introduction
1. Early liberalism, Adam Smith, and the seeds of the infrastructural state
2. Forging the infrastructural state: 1787–1837
3. 'A wilderness of turnpike gates:' roads and public authority in antebellum America
4. The panic of 1837, the infrastructure crash, and the rise of public purpose
5. The ground under our feet: the birth of public utilities
6. The death of laissez faire and the rise of infrastructure in the cold war.

Subject Areas: International law [LB]