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 and Chair of the German Department at the University of Oxford, specialising in German intellectual history. He has published widely on key issues and figures from Meister Eckhart in the fourteenth Century, to contemporary German philosophers such as Christoph Menke and Rahel Jaeggi. Combining this rich body of thought with phenomenology, evolutionary and cultural theory, psychology, and 4E cognition, he has contributed to the History of Distributed Cognition (Edinburgh UP, 2020), and co-edited ‘Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture’ (Poetics Today 2017).

His monograph On Becoming God (Fordham UP, 2013) transforms contemporary discussions of the ‘self.’ His current book project, Reclaiming Liberalism: The Culture of a Democratic Society, responds to the crises many liberal democracies face today. Building upon the tradition of liberal thinkers, particularly from the German-speaking world, alongside current research in the cognitive sciences, Morgan develops ways of thinking clearly about the how and why humans develop the cultural interactions that form the social capital on which complex modern societies, and indeed democracy itself, depend.