Discipline and justify: Ideas and the making of economic hierarchy

Abstract

Debates about the social and political foundations of capitalism have a long lineage, stretching back to classic critiques of market society. In recent years, this tradition has been renewed by scholars examining the evolving institutional and political conditions that underpin capitalist market systems. Two recent books, Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order and Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards , also take up this mantle, offering new accounts of how contemporary capitalism has been conceptualized, defended, and sustained. While Mattei reconstructs the political project of austerity in the aftermath of the First World War and seeks to connect it to contemporary austerity, Slobodian traces recent permutations of neoliberal thought that rationalize economic inequality not through timeworn appeals to cultural difference but by marshalling the language of science and biological variation. Read together, the books illuminate both the shifting strategies through which capitalist order has been stabilized across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the analytical consequences of distinct ways of understanding the relationship between ideas and power.