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.
At the conference, we aim at bringing together experts on the political history of (mainly) market economies over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In order to avoid all too abstract and mainly conceptual discussions on the “populist” character of certain debates or movements, we are interested in scrutinizing the concrete ways in which popular and moral rhetorics have interacted historically with transformations of the economic life on a national as well as on an international level. The question how basic processes of democratization, globalization or financializiation have affected economic imaginaries in political conflicts will serve as a common background to our reflections.
On a methodological level, we are interested in understanding how popular representations of the economy are constructed and communicated by historical actors. In general, referring to the economy in political conflicts, seems to invite its depiction in a holistic manner. Thus, we will focus on those conceptualizations of the economy that refuse to accept the growing complexity of economic life as well as the resulting limits of individual and collective agency. Rather than conceding the confines and boundedness of their knowledge, these explanations of the economy – as well as politics and society – claim universal validity and lack ambiguities. Secondly, we are interested in understanding the power of personification in economic arguments and in gathering support for political agendas. The creation of bigger-than-life figures, assumed to reign over economic developments and social inequalities, is, thirdly, based on popular media structures and visual logics that will also be scrutinized at the conference. Finally, we want to look at the application of moral and binary reasoning to economic processes, depicting decision-making in the economic realm as an outcome of manichaeic antagonisms. To sum up, we are interested in determining both the structural and discursive elements as well as the political force of interventions which present a political economy for everybody.