This chapter sets out the main objectives and major themes of the work. The overall aim of the project is to establish the implications of a diminishing contract law (common law in particular).By ‘diminishment’ is meant the return to formal and classical law values in the common law and a reduced field of application for the rules of contract law. A brief outline is given of the topics that are explored during the course of the book: the rise of private ordering through contracts and the legal response to this; the ‘contractualisation’ of society; the formalist turn in modern contract law; the likely future pressures on legal development (such as ‘smart contracts’).The chapter raises some initial arguments concerning the drawbacks of a diminishing contract law (lack of development of public rules of contract law; lack of legal scrutiny of many modern contracts, or aspects of them; lack of opportunity for courts to express and apply the normative values that should underpin contracting). The chapter also anticipates, and responds to, some initial questions or criticisms about the project.

As Chapter 3 explored, corporate governance centres upon the accountability of directors through votes and duties to members. Membership is mainly monopolised by shareholders. So, who are shareholders, and what influence do they exert in financial markets? For many years, real people held shares directly. Characters like Mr Salomon with his boots, Mr Macaura and his (company’s) smouldering timber, and Mr Pender in his telecoms empire helped write the script, and still animate the world imagined in company law texts.

When I got my first full-time job as an academic, a professor that I admired very much took me for lunch, and I said wanted to start a course on ‘enterprise law’. I said it would be about the economic constitution, rights, corporations and public services. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that’, said the professor, ‘what you should really think about is who you want to be.’ I went away and I thought about this carefully. I decided I wasn’t so interested in ‘being’ anybody particular, if that just meant having a title or an office, but rather I wanted to ‘do’ something.

‘Nothing travels faster than the speed of light’, wrote the author Douglas Adams, ‘with the possible exception of bad news.’ Just like our personal communications, the Internet has revolutionised our media, both in speed and nature. With ever-faster technology, public news and entertainment has shifted from print, to radio, to television and now to the web. Each new development widened the audience, and created greater psychological intimacy. Politicians and other performers entered the living room, as personal as a coffee house, a debating club in a pub, or a theatre.

‘If you want peace, prepare for war’, wrote Vegetius in the fourth century. Whether or not this was true in the twilight of Rome’s military empire, it has little evidential basis today. ‘Peace can be established’, wrote the Versailles Treaty, ‘only if it is based upon social justice.’ And as this wisdom went unheeded, as victors demanded reparations, World War Two engulfed the globe in flames again. Humanity’s desire to end war was enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter, and the ideals of a just society in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Preamble to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recalled that ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’.

Given enterprise law’s dynamism, and the time to publish a book, many things changed since the Afterword. First, despite the cautious optimism of February 2021, Putin launched a full criminal war in Ukraine in February 2022, lost over 25 per cent of the Russian army’s combat capability in two months, instructed massacres, mass rape, and countless war crimes. This is another fossil fuelled war (Ch. 19). Europe and Germany (with ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as a Gazprom director) bankrolled Putin with imports for years. Now, the EU and UK have begun to eliminate Russian fossil fuels. As must be clear, the law should stop all fossil fuels. Swapping one dictator’s oil or gas for another’s will not reduce geopolitical risk, nor stop climate damage, nor deploy the clean, cheap technology already have.

The central justification for private enterprises, where investors may profit from production, is that competition ensures they serve the public interest. The father of economics, Adam Smith, believed that, with corporations banned, a world of competitive partnerships would ‘make nearly the same distribution’ as if ‘the earth [were] divided into equal portions’, like they were ‘led by an invisible hand’.

‘Of all the occupations’, wrote Cicero in 44 bc, ‘none is better than agriculture, none more profitable, none more delightful, none more becoming to a free man’. Growing a garden, the countryside, the shade of trees, the sound of running water, have long been things of romance. But unlike for Roman nobility, over most of human history people’s toil for food and water was a matter of survival. The Industrial Revolution enabled society to live beyond subsistence, sustaining modern towns and cities, and crucially shifting work away from the farm.

This chapter examines the relationship betweenprivate ordering/self-regulation and national contract law rules. It assesses the impact that private ordering exerts upon national contract law, with particular reference to the legal response to the ISDA Master Agreement. The chapter also examines aspects of market-specific regulation in the United Kingdom. Many areas traditionally covered by common law rules, such as the control of unfair terms in contract, are now the preserve of regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Competition and Markets Authority. In addition to the activities of regulators, enforcement of consumer contract law can be undertaken by a range of organisations and dispute resolution services provided by private entities or through various ADR schemes. There are often significant divergences between the regulatory approach to contract enforcement and the applicable contract law rules on the issue. To illustrate this, the FCA review of the mis-selling of interest rate hedging products to ‘unsophisticated’ customers is contrasted with case law on misrepresentation covering the corresponding scenario under the common law.