Speaker
Christian Joerges is Professor Emeritus of Law and Society at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin and Co-Director of the Centre of European Law and Politics at the University of Bremen. Until 2007, he held the Chair for European Economic Law at the European University Institute. Recent publications include The ‘Political’ in the Economic and its Law, in G. Gregoire and X. Miny (ed), The Idea of Economic Constitution in Europe (Leiden, 2022), Conflict and Transformation. Essays on European Law and Policy (Hart, 2022) and Darker legacies of law in Europe : the Florence project revisited. Accomplishments, failings, lessons, (EUI Working Paper, 2023).
Synopsis
As the Second World War was drawing to a close in 1944, two great works of political economy were published. One of them was Friedrich August von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, inspiring the defenders of free-market movements ever since and up to the present. The other was Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. This Event will focus on Polanyi but also pay tribute to Hayek. Contrasting the two helps to understand both of them better. Of the two, Hayek, is of course more widely known and by far more influential. But Polanyi’s work, too, has achieved such attention that one of the Directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne proclaimed that we are all Polanyian now not only in economic sociology, but also in related disciplines, including political economy and political theory. A plethora of aspects of The Great Transformation are very widely discussed. This Event will be concerned with the not-so-well explored importance of Polanyi’s work for European Law and legal scholarship in general, including his theorems on the ‘embedded economy’, his conceptualization of labour as a ‘fictitious commodity’ and the notion of counter-movements. It will then juxtapose Polanyi’s expectation of a new international order with the development of the European integration project and sketch out the contours of the democracy-enhancing conflicts law and its affinities with Polanyian core normative principles.
The participants are invited to read Fred Block’s Introduction to the Great Transformation.