9 Feb 2009 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm | CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane |
- Description
Description
Critical Reflections on Economic Thought
Will Davies (PhD candidate, Sociology and Cultural Studies, Goldsmith College, University of London)
Capitalism as competitive sport: forms of authority in neoliberal thought
Securing a free competitive order is a preoccupation of liberal economic theory from the late nineteenth century onwards, being viewed as the basis for the state's authority. Within ordo-liberal and neo-liberal thinking, law becomes represented pragmatically as the rule of a competition while the state's authority is analogous to that of a referee. This presentation will explore how ordo-liberals and Chicago neo-liberals have emphasised the need to formalise the rules of competition, so as to reduce the role of informal norms in economic life, enabling competitors to become as atomised as possible. It will link this to the more formal problem of rules, as it occurs in the work of Goffman and Wittgenstein. It will also address the threat that the executive branch of government poses to these same bodies of thought, and look at alternative means of coping with the executive in rival bodies of neo-liberal thinking.
Open to all. No registration required.
Part of the Business and Society Research Group Series.