Description
1.
Current Importance
After a global financial crisis, and in the midst of a global supply shortage, it seems more than ever necessary to re-examine the fundamentals of our economic order. Our project ‘Economic Pluralism: Past and Present’ takes on this task – through a historical lens: Turning to little-known and infrequently studied economic visions from the long 19th century (visions by figures such as J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, J.S. Mill and G. Simmel), it rediscovers philosophical ‘roads not taken’– and shows them to hold important insights for the present economic moment. Indeed, while most of the thinkers examined in the project are usually not remembered for their contributions to economic thought at all, but rather for their contributions to other philosophical fields (such as metaphysics, epistemology or ethics), their economic proposals have a surprising potential to help us enrich the contemporary discourse by exploring heterodox economic possibilities.
2.
Economic Pluralism
In particular, most of the thinkers considered in our project are committed to what one could call ‘Economic Pluralism’: the idea that a good economic order has to incorporate elements that are associated with classic capitalism (such as a free market), yet combine them with elements associated with classic socialism (such as worker cooperatives, economic planning or even collective ownership of the means of production). Bringing these two sides together in one economic system raises a number of intriguing philosophical, economic and political questions, which will be at the heart of our workshop: Are individualism and solidarity really in tension with each other? Can freedom and equality be combined in an economic order? Can markets be organized such as to further the social bonds between its participants, instead of destroying them? Are centrally planned economies compatible with private property and/or with individual freedom? And what does any of this mean, concretely, for how ethics and economics today can be reconciled?
3.
Workshop
To put this in other words: Our project will initiate a critical discussion of alternative and largely unknown economic systems from the past, discussing their potential to solve longstanding economic problems of the present. The core activity of our project is the two-day workshop that will take place at McMaster University in September 2022.