In 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously and prematurely wrote that the world was seeing “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism”. A decade later Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, two American law professors, made a similar argument about the way companies are run. The world was converging on a superior model of shareholder capitalism, they argued: firms subordinating the interests of capital to managers, workers and states would soon crumble like the Berlin Wall.
