The economy and contradicting understandings of it have loomed large in political conflicts at least since the rise of liberalism and Marxism in the 19th Century. Various actors popularized and moralized economic relations in order to garner support for political change. In recent years, these processes have been discussed under the label of populism, as many observers diagnosed „populist“ backlashes against liberal political and economic elites. In general, they consider the world economic crisis and its social consequences as the root cause for the growth of political movements that make use of various rhetorics of simplification. Calling them „populist“, however, is highly problematic. Populism is rarely used as a self-description and notoriously hard to define so that critics question the analytic value of the term. Mostly used in a derogatory manner, the term signifies „demagoguery“, false promises, illegitimate simplification of the world or even the production of „alternative facts“. In contrast, political and economic actors accused of populism claim that they express the simple truth that is commonly distorted and hidden, that they represent the „common sense“ or an „egalitarian“ approach to politics. Populism, thus, is „a way of constructing the political“ (Ernesto Laclau), less an ideology than a political culture. In its clearest sense, the label may be applied to actors who frame politics, society, and the economy in a specific way: who claim to be the representatives of „the people“ – which may be defined nationally or socially – fighting against the interests of an established „elite“. Whereas most political movements rely on simplified and popular constructions of the economy, narratives that are deemed populist reduce the complexity of social processes more radically to a binary conflict in which a certain group of people or even a single person is blamed for the fate of the collective.

Throughout the twentieth century, economic arguments gained currency in political movements especially when social inequality and market instabilities were growing. Some authors argued that it was in these contexts that „heterodox“ economic thinking gained support, rejecting the mainstream liberal economic tenets. Yet, a political economy for everybody is simultaneously less and more than that. Rarely amounting to an elaborate economic theory, it can neither be reduced to a specific school of thought nor to a single ideological strain. Rather, it is politically promiscuous and its „right-wing“ and „left-wing“ forms may even overlap as, for example, in their criticism of ”finance capital” or ”globalism.” In particular, the cleavage between nationalist and globalist thinking has often defied the classical left-right distinctions. Since the 1970s, the rise of a global financial market capitalism apparently challenging the sovereignty of national governments has further accelerated and amplified this development. Besides, even mainstream economics and liberal economic globalism rely on simplifying and moralizing economic processes in order to gain political support.

In an attempt to understand the role of the economy in political conflicts, we would suggest that it becomes particularly attractive when constructed in a holistic and manichaeic manner. Thus we want to focus on those uses of the economy that refuse to accept the growing complexity of economic life over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as the resulting limits of individual and even collective agency. Rather than conceding the confines and perspectivity of their knowledge, holistic explanations of the economy – as well as politics and society – claim universal validity and lack ambiguities. Secondly, we want to look at the application of binary moral reasoning to economic processes, dividing economic actors into good and evil. At the conference we want to examine the variety of ways in which the economy was popularized and moralized in political conflicts as well as the changing conditions for movements using these narratives to garner support in the political realm. Thus, we are interested in determining both the structural elements as well as the force of interventions which have recently been called populist. We invite contributions focusing on the following four layers of reasoning:

1) the holistic construction of „the economy“ as a universal life-determining force together with its basic governing principles
2) the personification of economic structures and relationships through the imagination of antisocial individuals or hated minorities as a means of gathering support
3) the medialization and visualization of the economy with the help of abstractions as a means to make positions accessible to broader audiences
4) the moralization of economic processes and the construction of manichaeic antagonisms, such as elite/masse-distinctions, juxtaposing specific pressure groups against the idea of a „common good“ as well as against representative bodies

If you are interesting in contributing a paper addressing one or more of these aspects, please, send an abstract (max. 2.000 characters) and a short CV to graf@zzf-potsdam.de and stefanie.middendorf@uni-jena.de by January 3, 2022. We will notify the participants soon afterwards and cover the costs of travel and accommodation.