Are Markets Like Mushrooms? and Other Neoliberal Quandries (original) (raw)
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Research directions on states and markets
A Research Agenda for Economic Anthropology, 2019
Which research trends promise to make the anthropology of states and markets particularly interesting during the years to come? What do these trends tell us about the nature of economic anthropology at a time when more and more of our scholarship is conducted within bureaucracies rather than local communities? In this chapter I attempt to answer both of these questions. I begin with a brief sketch of insights that result from treating states and markets as essentially different, albeit related, entities, drawing especially on recent work on the nature of neoliberal-ism and global inequality. The bulk of this chapter, however, will focus on those aspects of state and market institutions that show them to be largely collaborative, similar social formations. In doing so, I mean to suggest that future anthropologi-cal research should be more explicitly concerned with aspects that cut across the state-market division, including the study of financialisation and ritual. For each of the themes explored here, the methodological message is the same: economic anthropologists should continue their concern for disenfranchised social groups, continue to carry out research marked by long-term physical engagement and continue to develop concepts that can be applied across differences of time and space. This will allow us to provide analyses of states and markets that promise to be both distinctive to our discipline and relevant for society at large. States and markets as different entities For more than a decade, anthropologists approaching states and markets as fundamentally different have tended to describe their relationship with reference to neoliberalism. Drawing on a recent review by Tejaswini Ganti (2014: 91), we can distinguish at least four different meanings of neoliberalism. Firstly, it refers to a model of development with specific roles for labour, capital and the state, and since capital tends to be privileged in this model some have described neoliberalism as a class-based project (Harvey 2005). Secondly, the term denotes historically-situated economic policies including fiscal prudence, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalisation, precarious work regimes and privileging lenders over borrowers in times of debt default. Thirdly, it refers to treating notions linked to market exchange as central to interpreting and evaluating human action. Lastly, it denotes a mode of governance that fosters market-based values such
Until the 19 th century, politics and economics were not discrete fields. In Europe during the early modern period, power and profit formed a single logic: property and title went hand-inhand with administrative offices; warfare was conducted by 'privateers' as well as 'crown' forces; and sovereignty was closely bound up with commerce. Power and profit only became formally demarcated during the course of the 19 th century. During this period, 'economic' interactions were increasingly carried out through 'faceless' transactions via the 'symbolic token' of 'generalized money' (Simmel 1978[1900]: 332-3). Under these conditions, every product was exchangeable, including labour. Hence, for the first time, 'free labour' could be sold (as wages) according to market logics. The bracketing of a 'private' sphere of market exchange had the simultaneous effect of generating a 'public' sphere of political regulation. The economy became the realm of civil society mediated by logics of market exchange ('the self-regulating market' organised through 'the invisible hand'), while politics became the realm of the state governed by the national interest ('raison d'état'). The decoupling of politics and economics was as much ideal as it was real. It was ideal in that states and markets remained tightly intertwined: just as the market required the state to recognise private property and provide a legal apparatus that could sustain accumulation and enforce contracts, so the state required the revenues that accrued from property, accumulation and contracts. But it was also real inasmuch as market logics were given a degree of autonomy, both semantically and legally. The separation of states and markets that, from a contemporary viewpoint, appears natural can be traced to practices the emerged during the 19 th century (Giddens 1985: 135-6; Rosenberg 1994: 126). Any discussion of the relationship between states and markets is putting back together what was once an organic whole. This chapter examines the relationship between states and markets over the last century and a half, since the emergence of the first stage of globalisation. Its goal is to demonstrate the extensive entanglements through which logics of rule and gain have been sustained. In
The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition
The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, 2014
At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability. 1 THE DISENCHANTMENT OF POLITICS Neoliberalism, sovereignty and economics F riedrich Von Hayek believed that the intellectual, political and organizational forces of liberalism began a downward trajectory around 1870 (Hayek, 1944: 21). In place of the decentralized structure of the Victorian marketplace and British classical economics, came trends towards bureaucratization, management and the protection of the 'social' realm, all accompanied by a growing authority for German institutionalist and historicist ideas. By the 1940s this had reached the point of emergency. Having witnessed a financial crisis usher in Fascism, Keynesianism and then a world war, Hayek viewed the choices of political modernity in starkly binary terms: We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and "conscious" direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals. (1944: 21) Reversing this trend would mean restoring the political authority of 'impersonal' and 'anonymous' mechanisms, and of 'individual' and 'unconscious' forces in public life, which lack any 'deliberately chosen goals'. When Hayek looked back to the high period of British liberalism, what he mourned was a society that had no explicitly collective or public purpose, and whose direction could not be predicted or determined. The central function of markets in this nostalgic vision was to coordinate social activity without intervention by political authorities or 'conscious' cooperation by actors themselves. And if there were other ways of THE LIMITS OF NEOLIBERALISM 4 coordinating individuals' unconscious goals, impersonally and anonymously, these might be equally welcome as markets. The virtue of markets, for Hayek, was their capacity to replace egalitarian and idealist concepts of the common good that he believed could lead to tyranny.
Ruling markets: the marketization of social and economic policy
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2015
It has become a commonplace observation that the long-standing focus on the realm of production in economic geography came at considerable costs. While economic geographers' attention remained strongly fixated on the production side of the economy, mainstream economics moved towards an ever more abstract focus on exchange equilibriums modeled in analogy to auctions and the functioning of stock exchanges (Knorr Cetina, 2006). The resulting division of labor, while so important for the emergence of economic geography as a critical, politically viable project, turned into a liability at a time when the idea of the perfect market increasingly imposed itself, influencing ever larger swathes of social life. Fortunately, this situation has changed. Economic geographers have finally rediscovered the market both as an abstract institutional logic as well as in its materialization ''on the ground'' (
Utopian Liberalism: State and Market in Classical Liberalism and Neoliberalism
A Great Transformation?: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Capitalisms, 2017
There is an apparent paradox at the core of the study of neoliberalism. Although a growing research literature in recent decades have documented how neoliberal ideas about free markets and privatization has been increasingly dominant in universities, government agencies and international organizations, this neoliberal dominance have not in meant any meaningful sense meant rollback of state power. Among the more sophisticated works of the neoliberalism, we have seen an analysis stating that the goal of neoliberalism is not a simple realization of minimal state in which state power is rolled back in favour of market forces. Instead, researchers such as Michel Foucault, Philip Mirowski and Jamie Peck see neoliberalism as a project that is aiming towards a redefinition of the relationship between state and market. The goal is not only to deregulate, but also to use state power to actively reshape the economy. This nuanced understanding of the relationship between state and market in neoliberalism, however is often made by contrasting it with a distorted version of the classic liberalism of the nineteenth century 1 , which is being portrayed as a simple realization of the principle of laissez-faire 2 and the minimal state. This idea of a sharp contrast between neoliberalism and classical laissez-faire liberalism can be traced back to the early neoliberal such as Hayek, who in the period after the Great Depression formulated neoliberalism, as a stated contrast to what they perceived as the dogmatism and simplicity 1 Liberalism purposes for the purposes of this article, us delimited as the self-identifying political liberal movement in line with Fawcett, (2015). "Liberals" from the period before the term was first used in Spain from the 18010s are therefore only touched upon sporadically 2 The term laissez-faire originated from the physiocratic school in 1700s France (Viner, 1960), but in this article will be used to denote the period of the doctrines dominance within liberal economic thinking in the first part of the nineteenth century.
The Dream to Tame the Leviathan: Authoritarian Power and the Market
2018
The idea of competitive markets was built on the dream to tame the Leviathan, erasing the influence of authoritarian power. This chapter explores the opposition between the State and the market in the history of economics, from Smith to Walras, from Schumpeter to Hayek. It deals with power in authoritarian States, looking both at totalitarianism in the twentieth century and at the return of authoritarianism in the contemporary world. In hybrid authoritarian States, the political dynamics calls into question the relations between those in power and the market space; markets work at the junction of private interests and public power. A broad area of research focuses on the ways the state and the market intermingle in different institutional models and paths of development.
Neo-liberalism - A Theory of the Free Economy and a Strong State
2011
In this paper I will critically discuss whether it is true or not that Neoliberalism is signified by a strong state in combination with a free economy. First of all I will give a short illustration of the evolution from the classical liberal approach of Adam Smith to modern Neoliberalism á la Hayek or Friedman and further continue with a distinction between the strong (liberal) state which has the sole power to coerce and the weak (democratic) state which is said to be guided by ‘imprudent’ majority rule rather than law and order. Subsequently, I will argue that the liberal state is mainly dominated by bourgeois interests in setting up ‘equal’ property rights and by undermining democratic processes. Thus, governments function more as an obedient enforcer of the ‘free’ market which finally becomes the playing field of pure efficiency, civil repression and competition instead of being a politically legitimized society/market-balancing institution.
British Journal of Political Science, 2017
:There has been a remarkable shift in the relation between market and state responsibilities for public services like health care and education. While these services continue to be financed publicly, they are now often provided through the market. The main argument for this new institutional division of labor is economic: while (public) ends stay the same, (private) means are more efficient. Markets function as ‘mere means’ under the continued responsibility of the state. This paper investigates and rejects currently existing egalitarian liberal theories about this division of labor and it presents and defends a new theory of marketization, in which social rights and democratic decision-making occupy center-stage.
Střed. Časopis pro mezioborová studia Střední Evropy 19. a 20. století 6, 1 (2014), 193-200.
Research about "neoliberalism" -a term that is as commonplace as it is ill-defined -has expanded in recent years, not least because of the apparent pressure on this free-market ideology in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. 1 This included scholarly investigations into as well as openly partisan accounts of the historical origins, development and diffusion of neoliberal ideology and politics. 2 Post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe has been of particular interest in this context, as it is perceived as one of the regions where neoliberal ideology celebrated one of its most important triumphs, following the collapse of communist regimes in 1989. 3