The paper will consider the narratives by which liberal market democracies are either endowed with legitimacy or called into question, drawing on recent work on the role of narrative in people’s understanding of political economy. Benjamin Morgan will present both the constructive role of ideas in the development of modern, liberal-democratic forms of prosperity (Mokyr, McCloskey), as well as the potentially destructive effects of appealing but misguided ‘folk economic’ narratives (Boyer, Shiller). One key area of contention is the very idea of the market itself, an issue that Friedrich Hayek addressed in his introduction to “Capitalism and the Historians” (1954). However, as the current success of the new English translation of Marx’s Capital vol. 1 (2024) suggests, the basic tropes of the anti-market and anti-capitalist narrative retain their popularity. He will be challenging these tropes at their root. Morgan’s alternative narrative of the market economy combines arguments from Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics (1871) with recent insights from the cognitive sciences into the distributed and predictive mechanisms of human cognition to articulate conceptual tools that allow us to re-frame and strengthen the connection between free markets, situated individual creativity, and shared social flourishing.

Speaker

Benjamin Morgan is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Worcester College. In 2019, and 2020/21 he was Visiting Associate Professor of German at Harvard University. He is currently working on a book entitled: Reclaiming Liberalism: The Culture of a Democratic Society. He is author of On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self (Fordham UP, 2013), and numerous articles on modernist philosophy, literature, and film. He has edited, with Carolin Duttlinger and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012), and with Sowon Park and Ellen Spolsky a Special Issue of Poetics Today on “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” (2017).