To what extent are questions of sovereign debt a matter for political rather than scientific or moral adjudication? We answer that question by defending three claims. We argue that (i) moral and technocratic takes on sovereign debt tend to be ideological in a pejorative sense of the term, and that therefore (ii) sovereign debt should be politicised all the way down. We then show that this sort of politicisation need not boil down to the crude Realpolitik of debtor-creditor power relations—a (...) conclusion that would leave no room for normative theory, among other problems. Rather, we argue that (iii) in a democratic context, a realist approach to politics centred on what Bernard Williams calls ‘The Basic Legitimation Demand’ affords a deliberative approach to the normative evaluation of public debt policy options. (shrink)

Volume 17, Issue 5, November 2020, Page 494-509.

According to Streeck and Vogl, the neoliberalization of the state has been the result of political-economic developments that render the state dependent on financial markets. However, they do not explain the discursive shifts that would have been required for demoting the state to the role of an agent to bondholders. I propose to explain this shift via the performative effect of neoliberal agency theory. In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling claimed that corporate managers are agents to shareholding principals, which (...) implied that their main task was the procurement of shareholder value. Agency theory subsequently prescribes a series of measures to ensure the alignment of principal and agent interests in corporations. The diffusion of agency theory, however, moved beyond corporate governance to reconfigure the state. Due to its reliance on capital markets, the state supposedly likewise becomes an agent of the investment public and should procure bondholder value. (shrink)

What is the relation between monetary policy and inequalities in income and wealth? This question has received insufficient attention, especially in light of the unconventional policies introduced since the 2008 financial crisis. The article analyzes three ways in which the concern central banks show for inequalities in their official statements remains incomplete and underdeveloped. First, central banks tend to care about inequality for instrumental reasons only. When they do assign intrinsic value to containing inequalities, they shy away from trade-offs with (...) the standard objectives of monetary policy that such a position entails. Second, central banks play down the causal impact monetary policy has on inequalities. When they do acknowledge it, they defend their actions by claiming that it is an unintended side effect, that it is temporary, and/or that any alternative policy would fare even worse. The article appeals to the doctrine of double effect to criticize these arguments. Third, even if one accepts that inequalities should be contained and that today’s monetary policies exacerbate them, is it both desirable and feasible to make containing inequalities part of the mandate of central banks? The article analyzes and rejects three attempts on the part of central banks to answer this question negatively. (shrink)

Research background: To a limited extent, modern researchers are interested in ordoliberalism, as a theory of the socio-economic system, which is confirmed by the results of the bibliometric analysis. In conducted studies, the assumptions of ordoliberalism are used partially, for example, for research on: the role of the state in the economy, the antitrust law, the theoretical assumptions of the SME, the determinants of German economic policy after World War II. Purpose of the article: The aim of this article is (...) to present the possibilities offered by the ordoliberal theory that predispose it to determine a socio-economic order which makes it possible to tackle the dysfunctions and crises that afflict today’s economy. Methods: The research methodology involves a critical analysis of the works of the most essential representatives of ordoliberal thought, particularly Walter Eucken and others, from the perspective of the above-mentioned purpose of the study. This requires examining German-, Polish- and English-language publications by authors recognised as representatives of mainstream ordoliberalism. Findings & Value added: As a result of the conducted analysis, the hypothesis about the existence of the elements of ordoliberal theory that allow it to respond to the challenges of the modern world, including economic, social, environmental and climate crises and pandemic threats has been confirmed. Research of this kind implies a return of thinking in terms of economic order, and thus contributes to the theories that seek to overcome the crisis in both the real economy and the theory of economics. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 10, Page 1480-1493, December 2022. By applying the concept of democracy and the state proposed by Richard Rorty, the article aims to make a theoretical contribution to understanding frames of political mobilization and solidarity. While Rorty’s conceptual instruments stem from the field of epistemology and moral philosophy and have, so far, not been widely applied to theorizing statehood in general and labour market policy in particular, his ideas can help to understand leftist politics (...) between inter- and re-nationalization. By drawing on empirical findings on debates and negotiations between European trade union organizations, the text proposes an idea on how to overcome a dualistic framework beyond a footloose cosmopolitanism and national protectionism. (shrink)

There is an extensive body of literature detailing the forces behind and experiences of alienation in a modern capitalist world. However, social scientific interest in alienation had become parochial and balkanized by the 1970s. To reconstruct a unifying theory of alienation that addresses general features of capitalism, such as compulsory growth and commodification, and particular phases like financialized capitalism, we begin with the notion of futurelessness. Futurelessness refers to a deficient relationship to the future in which people’s senses of possibility (...) ossify, narrow, or dissipate. It may result from inclusion in and exclusion from capitalist mechanisms or processes. Moreover, processes of inclusion and exclusion may appear more voluntary or involuntary. With these general terms, we identify four manifestations of futurelessness in financial capitalism: commercial exhaustion, imaginative marginalization, therapeutic nowism, and pragmatic denialism. The conclusion addresses future-sustenance in an alienating world and the prospects of a more systemic and synthetic approach to alienation. (shrink)

Throughout his life, Cornelius Castoriadis displayed an unwavering commitment to democracy. He militated for it and developed concepts to elucidate its significance for human freedom. Yet are the concepts Castoriadis developed enough to explain the depth of his aforementioned commitment? In this essay, I try to imagine how Castoriadis would have addressed Roberto Michels’s ‘iron law of oligarchy’ thesis. I find that Castoriadis’s concepts can help us question the normative value Michels assigned to oligarchy, but they fail to explain how (...) he could have remained so committed to democracy when oligarchy seems ineluctable. Such a commitment, I argue, ultimately rests on an existential decision, the roots of which cannot be rationally explained. (shrink)

In my reading of Free Market Fairness, I challenge Tomasi’s key assumption that that we can and should pursue the account of social justice laid down in its essentials by John Rawls, but with this one crucial change, that the ‘economic liberties’ which Rawls excludes from his framework of basic liberties should be included on that list and be appropriately prioritized and protected. I argue that Rawls had very good grounds for excluding the right to own productive capital from his (...) list of basic rights; in short, that such a move would not enhance justice as fairness. Tomasi’s embrace of American capitalism as an approximation of what entrenched economic liberties can be expected to deliver simply makes an incredible claim less plausible. (shrink)

Many states make use of personal identity numbers to govern people living in their territory and jurisdiction, but only a few rely on an all-purpose PIN used throughout the public and private sectors. This article examines the all-purpose PIN in Finland as a political technology that brings people to the sphere of public welfare services and subjects them to governance by public authorities and expert institutions. Drawing on documentary materials and interviews, it unpacks the history and uses of the PIN (...) as an elementary building block of the Nordic welfare state, and its emerging uses in the post-welfare data economy. The article suggests that, although the PIN is capable of individualizing, identifying, and addressing individuals, its most important and widely embraced feature is the extent to which it enables interoperability among public authorities, private businesses, and their data repositories. Interoperability, together with advances in computing and information technology, has made the PIN a facilitator of public administration, state knowledge production, and everyday life. More recently, in the post-welfare data economy, interoperability has rendered the PIN a national asset in all the Nordic countries, providing a great advantage to biomedical research, innovation business, and healthcare. (shrink)

When should binding debt contracts not be repaid? This article argues that whenever the repayment of sovereign debt threatens the human rights of the citizenry, this provides a weighty normative reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the latter over the former. Since there are specific, non-coincidental reasons to fear that a high indebtedness of states may result in the undermining of the socio-economic and the collective human rights of a state’s citizenry, the more specific thesis defended in this article is (...) the following: whenever debt repayment undermines the socio-economic and collective human rights of the state´s citizenry, states have a normatively weighty reason to prioritize the fulfilment of the citizen’s human rights over meeting their contractual debt payment obligations vis-à-vis their creditors. (shrink)

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the (...) ‘normal’ one that has to do with a constitutive need to balance growth of abstract wealth with demand for concrete commodities. Rather, it marks a meta-crisis of capitalism that is to do with the difficulties of sustaining abstract growth as such. This meta-crisis is the tendency at once to abstract from the real economy of productive activities and to reduce everything to its bare materiality. By contrast with a market economy that binds material value to symbolic meaning, a capitalist economy tends to separate matter from symbol and reduce materiality to calculable numbers representing ‘wealth’. Such a conception of wealth rests on the aggregation of abstract numbers that cuts out all the relational goods and the ‘commons’ on which shared prosperity depends. (shrink)

Aristotle warned against a 'missing middle' in logic (Gk Mesos – middle; intermediate). This paper submits that one of the reasons why there has been no major breakthrough in macroeconomics since the financial crisis of 2007-08 has been a missing middle in mainstream micro-macro syntheses, constrained by partial and general equilibrium premises. It maintains that transcending this needs recognition that large and dominant multinational corporations between small micro firms and macro outcomes – while also influencing both – merit the conceptual (...) paradigm of mesoeconomics. Drawing on a range of uses of the concept, it relates this to reasons for 'too big to fail' and suggests implications for policies to gain accountability of big business, including how a meso dimension to input-output could yield transparency on risk-prone financial transactions by banks, and of corporations contributing to climate change. It also critiques misrepresentation of Walras and Pareto, as well as suggesting areas for research which could address, and potentially redress, 'missing middles' in mainstream micro-macro syntheses. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe begin our introduction to this special issue by considering the interdisciplinary collaborations behind this project before reviewing previous research on political rhetoric, financial reporting and media coverage of austerity in transnational contexts. We consider aspects of moral storytelling that have arisen through the contextual complexities of societies in financial crisis and other moral tales of austerity in political rhetoric. Whilst much of the literature and debates covered here are concerned with UK economic policy and related British social contexts, we (...) will expand to include examples from other countries that reflect similar concerns on the ideological operations of austerity and financial discourse. Finally, some critical theoretical approaches to ideology and political economy are discussed in relation to the socio-economic areas covered in this special issue. The multiple discursive contexts of austerity that are covered here demonstrate the breadth of social concerns and conflicts that have developed in societies and institutions following the recent global economic crisis. (shrink)

It is an axiom of contemporary conversations about austerity and health care that the relationship between the two is essentially direct. Cutting funds damages health care systems and hurts the health of individuals who rely on them. Though this premise has provoked necessary discussion about global politics, the global economy and their impact on individual well-being, it is nonetheless intrinsically problematic. Assigning health and health care as objects of austerity not only obscures the complexity of health care systems and the (...) opacity of health’s definitional borders, but also misunderstands austerity, its manifestations and its significance. The ambition of this essay is to bring health care back into the debate, in order to establish the greater dynamism of the contemporary austerity and health care relationship. This historical reconstruction will challenge the significance of our current situating of austerity as health care’s bogeyman, press for a reconsideration of our contemporary definitions of the key factors involved here and finally conclude with some thoughts on how we might more productively approach the problem of health now. (shrink)

One of the main lessons to be learned from the Greek crisis is that large scale supranational communitarisation is a danger for democracy if mutual obligations between members undermine substantially the possibilities of political choice for the single member states. I argue that a well-balanced relation between responsibility, solidarity, performance incentives and democracy involves taking subsidiarity serious, as well as to admit a certain amount of institutional flexibility. This flexibility is demanded especially in the case of large scale communities which (...) include countries as members, like the EU, and in which the basic ideas of social, economical and financial policy are rather heterogeneous. Democracy, responsibility and solidarity must be in a well balanced relation for any community to function and to be generally acceptable to the citizens. This includes the defence of rather ambitious forms of civil participation and sovereignty of the people against the paternalistic pretensions of experts or of political and cultural elites. And responsibility ―as a basic condition for democracy― requires that the design of the contractual basis of the EU must make possible that voting communities really assume responsibility for their decisions, which includes bearing possible negative consequences of these decision on themselves. Preserving a certain leeway for differing decisions about economical, financial or social questions is necessary for giving democratic substance to the demand of the primacy of politics. This puts serious limits to ambitions for treaty-based supranational communitisations. (shrink)

The health sector is facing many challenges, and there is a need to maintain the delivery of high‐quality health‐care. Issues related to equity and access to health‐care have emerged in a context of an economic recession in which the sustainability of the health system depends on everyone, including the actions and decisions of professionals. Therefore, nurses and their skills may be the answer to ethical, professional and community health management, but this recession could lead to major problems in the education (...) of nurses in daily health‐care practice. Due to the limited availability of resources, nurses are increasingly taking leadership positions, continuing to develop their critical abilities and thinking skills, and considering sciences such as deontology and ethics. The main goals of this study were to reflect on the economic recession and its impact on health‐care and to demonstrate the contribution of nursing to the sustainability of health‐care and in the promotion of individuals' dignity. The authors conclude that health‐care depends on economic redistribution and, in this context, needs to be equitable and fair. Nurses have the responsibility to develop their profession according to the underlying sciences and can therefore strategically help the healthcare system. (shrink)

Efficiency is an important value for all publicly funded healthcare systems. Limited resources need to be used prudently and wisely in order to ensure best possible outcomes and waste avoidance. Since 2010, the drive for efficiency, in the UK, has acquired a new impetus, as the country embarked on an ‘age of austerity’ purportedly to balance its books and reduce national deficit. Although the NHS did not suffer any direct budget cuts, the austerity policies imposed on the welfare system, including (...) social and mental healthcare, have had a direct and detrimental impact on the healthcare service. This paper draws from a qualitative study conducted in three A&E Departments in England to explore the effects of austerity policies on the everyday experiences of doctors and nurses working in Emergency Departments. It discusses the operationalisation of efficiency in A&E, in a climate of austerity, and its effects on the experiences and practices of healthcare professionals. It uses the empirical data as a springboard to highlight the role of structures and regulations, in this case targets and protocols, in how core healthcare ethical values, such as empathy, are exercised in practice. It provides an analysis of the normative role structures and regulations can play on the perception and practice of professional duties and obligations in healthcare. (shrink)

The received wisdom among welfare state scholars is that policy feedbacks render social insurance programs durable. Yet, in the case of Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy, a voting majority of retired city workers accepted a settlement that asked them to waive key legal protections, formally accept gutted medical benefits, trimmed pension benefits, and a new public-private pension financing mechanism. This article synthesizes interactionist theories of loss to introduce the concept of “collective cooling.” I argue that collective cooling helps to establish the limits (...) of policy feedbacks by explaining how a group of retirees’ collective self-understandings were adjusted from that of contractual rights holders to charitable dependents. Key components of this process included: First, seeking to adjust understandings of how pensioners were perceived by powerful outsiders; And, second, seeking to adjust the loss from one that reflected poorly on pensioners to one that did not. Implications are discussed for how people accept unexpected economic losses, especially those imposed by a trusted institution such as an employer or government organization. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article aims to make a methodological contribution to the ‘argumentative turn’ in policy analysis and to the understanding of the public debate on the UK Government's austerity policies. It suggests that policy arguments are practical arguments from circumstances, goals and means–goal relations to practical conclusions that can ground decision and action. Practical proposals are evaluated in light of their potential consequences. This article proposes a deliberation scheme and a set of critical questions for the evaluation of deliberation and decision-making (...) in conditions of incomplete knowledge. It illustrates these questions by analysing a corpus of articles from five newspapers over the two months following the adoption of the first austerity budget in June 2010. It also suggests how analysis of ‘frames’ and ‘framing’ can be integrated with the evaluation of deliberation and decision-making. (shrink)

This article develops an assessment of the present-day European crisis management, referring to Wolfgang Streeck’s recent interpretation of the European ‘consolidation state’ as an attempt to install a ‘Hayekian’ regime of liberalized transnational markets. This article arrives at a diagnosis different from Streeck’s: if there has been a ‘Hayekian’ regime, it had already developed after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973 and the subsequent dismantling of capital controls in the USA and Europe. As it appeared in the (...) financial crisis of 2007–2008, the ultimate practical test of the Hayekian vision was dramatically negative. European crisis management, as it is still largely occupied with the imperative to maintain the solvency of troubled Euro states vis-à-vis the capital markets, is not following a Hayekian script. Rather, it is confronted with the challenge of removing the debris of the collapse of the former Hayekian regime, taking the form of zombie banks and large uncovered capital claims. To master this challenge, not only intact European institutions and transnational cooperation in Europe would be required, but also much more democratic pressure from below. (shrink)

This thesis investigates a theoretical response to the question of what constitutes the political implications of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This thesis, working within the tradition of critical and cultural theory, undertakes a sustained engagement with the works of Jacques Derrida to theorise the traditions, norms, and practices that inform a response to an event such as the crisis of 2008. This thesis works with his proposals that: the spectre of its limitations haunts politics; that this has led to (...) the ‘deconstruction’ of the meaning of politics through complex textual frameworks; and that this dynamic leads to a tension between the arrival of new political possibilities on the one hand and new forms of political sovereignty on the other. After examining the significance of Derrida’s approach and secondary literature debating its interpretation, this thesis deconstructs the political implications of the crisis from politics in the traditional sense of the nationstate, the textual politics of scholarship, and finally the politics of the media, the domain, I argue, that incorporates the most discrete and sophisticated forms of sovereign decision-making. Finally, this thesis opens up its findings to secondary literature that suggest contrasting arguments. (shrink)

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Lesley Hawkes on hope seen in author F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and in the election of U.S. President Barack Obama, one by Bill Ashcroft on three contradictions in thinking about utopias and one by Vivienne Muller on body image in women and the change room mirror.