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bottom of the most refined constructs in economic and legal action. However, exposing the irrational is not where the analysis ends, in the spirit of Carl Schmitt's decisionism, but where it begins. 4 Neither theory is aimed simply at denouncing the elaborate practices of justification and calculation in economics and law as being merely an ideological mystification of power constellations. 5 On the
, economics was the gateway to European political unity. During the postwar era, collective memory provided a corrective balance to the narrow, nationalistic cost–benefit calculations of economics. At the start of the twenty-first century this is no longer the case. The loss of the normative resources of collective memory helps explain the inability of the current generation of leaders to articulate a vision that goes beyond the instrumental reasoning of economics. The so-called Erfahrungsgeneration (‘generation of experience’) defined the early history of integration
poverty of neo-liberalism Nobody in the political mainstream speaks out against capitalism today. Opposition to free markets is seen as naive – or a proof of ignorance of the laws of economics. Hibernating or moribund Marxists of a Gramscian hue may talk about a ‘hegemonic project’, others – however reluctantly – may admit to Fukuyama’s thesis of the ‘End of History’ (Fukuyama 1992); that world history, ideologically speaking, has ended, that liberalism has triumphed. Scores of reports trumpet the virtues of the prevailing system of market capitalism – and are followed
terms of its own laws. It is here that Foucault announces that in the history of economics, as far back as one cares to go, the economic was never seen as a single domain with its own laws, models, rationality, and method, standing alone, but as existing always within a political form of civil society. 6 Ferguson is represented as endorsing Foucault’s own preferred axioms concerning the social nature of the subject, the fallacy of the theory of the social contract, the necessary complementarity of the political with the economic, the dispersion of powers across
of the world, the territorially demarcated nation state quite manifestly has existed since the demise of feudalism. It continues to play a major role, with residual feudal characteristics in some cases, in planning and co-ordinating the operations of key social systems such as law, health, economics, transport, housing, education, politics, and the system of scientific and scholarly research. Whilst these operations retain a recognisably territorial inflection, it can be shown that there is nothing inherently national about law, health, economics, transport, and
renewed attention to the role of economics in political life. 3 Collective memory and the return of fascism I have devoted much of this project to demonstrating how the rupture of 1945 provided postwar leaders with the cognitive, motivational, and justificatory resources of transnationally shared collective memory, which allowed them to recombine the pieces of the shattered past to form a new historical narrative of European integration as a moral and political necessity. However, as detailed in Part II, the European project is increasingly imperilled at a time when
juridification of their operations and instead adopt other possible methods of de-paradoxification. This clearly shows why the state constitution occupies a unique position among social constitutions. This position certainly does not derive from the state's constitutional monopoly, as state-centric constitutional lawyers would have us believe, since other disciplines – historiography, economics, sociology and
scientists. But only scientists in the same small sub-field can really understand each other. That is what, for Bourdieu, is specific about science. This, incidentally, leads Bourdieu to make a somewhat barbed comment about economics as a sort of pseudo-science. Economics adopts ‘science effects’ from authentic science not by being particularly sound on the realist front – that is, by being true – but by being an exceptionally authoritarian discipline: in other words by imitating the closure of science through essentially disciplinary means. Economics is not
research, education or health, which are each displaying their proper principles of rationality and normativity and which in the process of privatisation are undergoing changes to their institutional regime. Thus, instead of a bipolar relation between economics and politics, one has to think of privatisation in terms of a triangular relation between these two and the public service activities involved. The
the borderline between law, politics and economics, Teubner starts out from the fundamental premise that it is not possible to maintain the unity of a legal order by relying solely on the formal regulations produced by the state. Drawing on different strands of research – such as the sociology of organisations, the theory of democracy and neocorporatism 3 – Teubner sets out to identify some social tasks of the autonomous