Instructors:
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/Sciences Po; Jens Beckert, MPIfG; Marcin Serafin, Max Planck Partner Group Warsaw

This seminar explores the recent interest in the future in the social sciences. Recent work in economic sociology has brought out the importance of actors’ expectations, showing the influence of narratives and fictions on future developments as ways of embedding economic activity in stories and images of envisioned future capitalist development. Other strands of literature in economic geography, anthropology, and history have pinpointed the origins and use of tools of future crafting, such as forecasts and scenarios, as instruments of market making and as contributors to the crafting of economic interests over time. The seminar aims to familiarize PhD students with this emerging research agenda.
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Conference Hosts:
Lucio Baccaro, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Jens Beckert, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo, Sciences Po
Olivier Godechot, MaxPo, Sciences Po

Through the long postwar period, crisis was a conjectural phenomenon, exceptional in a normalcy of growth and social progress. Many key concepts of the social sciences – indeed, our understanding of democracy, of embedded markets, of enlightened electorates, benevolent political elites, and problem-solving progressive alliances – seem inapt for understanding the current societal upheaval.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, we have witnessed majority alliances breaking down, populism returning on a grand scale both in the Western world and globally, and the new patterns of social mobilization erupting into chaotic and sometimes violent protest. The forces that underpinned the framework of welfare capitalism seem obsolete in the face of financial and political elites that are paradoxically both disconnected from national territory and sometimes in direct alliance with nationalist and populist movements. Politics of resentment, politics of place, and new politics of class interact in ways that we do not yet understand. Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that neoliberalism has spawned authoritarianism. At the same time, these processes are not at all new, but must be put in the context of the socioeconomic and cultural cleavages produced by the shift to neoliberalism since the 1970s.

The conference addresses the different facets of social destabilization that we observe today. It marks the fifth anniversary of the founding of MaxPo, the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies. Presentations will analyze different aspects of the overarching phenomenon of social destabilization trying to identify common threats in the diverse developments currently to be observed.

Conference program and list of participants
MaxPo Discussion Paper 18/1
Think notes of the conference

Faculty and Speakers:
Jenny Andersson, MaxPo/Sciences Po; Ariane Leendertz, MPIfG; David Priestland, University of Oxford; Philipp Ther, Institute for East European History, Unviversity of Vienna

This seminar aims to familiarize students with the literature on neoliberalism in a range of fields from political science and political sociology to economic and social history. It also aims to shift bounda-ries of thinking around neoliberalism from a Western problem to a wider governmental and global project. In the seminar, students will gain an understanding of the cultural expressions of forms of marketization, the use of market devices as forms of both social mobility and social control, and the shifting relationship between political and economic elites in different contexts since 1970.
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