The shift from government to economic governance since the 1980s, and the associated marketization of socio-economic relationships that make up society, has often been linked to a specific kind of neoliberal faith in markets. While this focus on markets as superior allocation mechanism has been criticized as a form of (secular-political) ideology, there is a growing suspicion that Western Christianity might have played a role in the almost unchallenged optimism that surround market-based forms of economic governance.

Classical thinkers in historical-economic sociology and economic anthropology realized early on that religious faith and economic markets made powerful bedfellows. Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Polanyi, R. H. Tawney, Marcel Mauss, to name a few, worked with an inclusive understanding of the role of religion in the making of modern capitalism. Famously, Marx and his followers, like Walter Benjamin, suspected that the bourgeoisie had turned the economy itself into a quasi-religion – called ‘capitalism’ – driven by the commodity fetish and the spectre of capital. Weber in turn identified a particular religiosity at the origins of capitalist modes of production and accumulation, namely the anxiety about ‘the world’ that characterized Reformed Protestantism.
Weber’s contemporary Werner Sombart took this genealogical enquiry much further into Biblical times and the origins of Judaism. Up until the 1950s or so, many social theorists, economic anthropologists, economic historians and even economists (Hayek among them) readily accepted that the religious sphere and the sphere of economic decision-making were interrelated and thus needed to be studied together. With the rise of Cold War modernization theories and related secularization theorems, this economic-theological nexus became separated, and it was not before the 1980s that so-called ‘post-secular’ social theorists like Foucault, Agamben, Derrida, Taylor, Bellah, Joas, Habermas, Milbank, Henaff, Bryan S. Turner and Peter L. Berger took to the stage again. Some have identified the so-called ‘post-secular turn’ or ‘theological turn’ in social theory as a new development, that is, a new acceptance of the reality and potency of religious attitudes in social life, combined with a rejection of normative theories of secularization.

In terms of economic sociology and economic anthropology, one can also argue that the ‘return of religion’ allows us to revisit nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century classical scholars and ask in which ways their conceptualization of the sacred-profane dichotomy might provide new insights into contemporary capitalism and its myriad of new ways of economic organizing, including the ‘share-economy’, the ‘new commons’, and ‘invisible’ trading through algorithms. With the identification of the paradigm of economic theology, major advances have become possible in our concepts of power and the genealogy of government and economy.

This course provides students with a set of conceptual and analytic tools that will allow them to look at their own study projects in new ways, for example by revisiting key aspects of their research design in terms of the sacred/profane dichotomy, through the lens of the category of the transcendent, or in terms of a more generalized genealogy of governmentality and power. This course does not claim that all economic and managerial activities are necessarily also ‘religious’ in the narrow sense of the word. Rather, the key aim of the course is to expose finance and economics, and management and organization studies, to a genealogical enquiry that takes the essentially theological origins of many of our contemporary concepts and practices seriously. Along the way, students will learn to what extent, for example, the famed ‘spirit’ of capitalism still relates the economic realm to the sacred, and to what extent essential concepts and figures like money, debt, the entrepreneur, the consumer, and the manager are, in part, components of a theological genealogy of the economy.

The course requires the submission of a short paper that deals with conceptual problems or analytical designs in relation to the social study of economy and religion or economic or political theology. Furthermore, papers that apply the concepts of a range of classical (e.g., Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Marcel Mauss, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Polanyi, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, Georges Bataille) and more contemporary theorists (e.g., Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, Hans Joas, Jürgen Habermas, John Milbank, Marcel Henaff) to empirical problems in a variety of domains are welcomed. The paper can come from or be located across any discipline(s) in the social sciences or humanities, economics and management. The paper should state the theme and the analytical strategy of the PhD project and it should be approximately 5 pages in length. In the paper, PhD students should state their main analytical challenge/concern at the current stage in their project.

Papers must be in English. Deadline for paper submissions is August 29 2017.

A precondition for receiving the course diploma is that students attend the whole course.