8 February 2024: Beehive Seminar, Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy. Jason Jackson (Recording Available)
The Beehive is the regular guest seminar series given by invited researchers on the question
of how corporations figure in their work.
Seminars will alternate between face to face seminars in Melbourne, and online seminars.
Thursday 8 February 12-1 pm AEDT
Virtual presentation
The dual rise of neoliberalism and economic nationalism is a defining feature of our time. In this seminar, Dr Jackson will address this paradox through historical analysis of the capitalist transition in India. This seminar presents economic nationalism not simply as a preference for domestic business over foreign firms, but as a state-led project of moral ordering of capital that is a fundamental part of capitalism. In the last few decades, an important body of work has challenged the false dichotomy between state and market in fostering development, growth and progress. This work has shown how states in both developing and industrialized countries play a fundamental role in shaping markets. The seminar will build on this work by unpacking the moral dimensions of economic policymaking. It shows how states design market rules to support business actors who are deemed to contribute positively to desired societal change, whether foreign or domestic, while constraining those considered to be regressive market actors. This market architecture produces a hierarchical ordering of capital that is explicitly moral in character. The intellectual roots of this moral ordering can be found in tenets of market governance established in classical political economy. The seminar traces the evolution of that moral order through colonial and post-independence India