Faced with growing global material inequality and economic instability, it is urgent to re-examine the fundamentals of our economic order. The project ‘Economic Pluralism: Past and Present’ takes on this contemporary task from a historical perspective. Examining widely neglected economic proposals from the long 19th century (by e.g. J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, J.S. Mill, and G. Simmel), we turn to philosophers who are usually not read as economists – but whose economic proposals hold surprisingly important insights for the current discussion. Indeed, defying contemporary categorizations as either ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’, their proposals exhibit a pluralistic character often unseen in the contemporary discussion, but ripe for rediscovery – a rediscovery that our project aims to undertake.

In addressing these issues, the project will wrestle with fundamental questions at the intersection of ethics and economics, with a particular focus on issues surrounding markets, socialist values, and the intersection between the two. Do markets constitutively destroy values such as solidarity or community (and what is the meaning of those values)? Do rationally acceptable principles of distributive justice rule out (or, by contrast, indeed require) a market economy? Is individual freedom compatible with an economic order that is in whole or in part governed by an economic plan? Can market norms be compartmentalized into specific social spheres or do they inevitably colonize the entirety of the life-world?

The project is funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant