Reframing the History of the Competition Concept: Neoliberalism, Meritocracy, Modernity

Jonathan Hearn

doi:10.1111/johs.12324

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of ‘conceptual history’. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more ‘liberal’ forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life.

Highlights

This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance
Influential here has been Foucault’s lectures published as The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), which claimed that the shift from liberal to neoliberal economics entailed a shift from “exchange” to “competition” as the key organising concept of economic theory
When there are fundamental changes in how these relations are organized, new questions about how power is allocated and legitimated arise. This happens within relatively small organizations as they grow in scale. This happens on grander scales, when many interdigitating societies and their states go through such a transition together, as happened in Europe and its colonies across a long eighteenth century and the “Sattelzeit.” This period involved a ramifying reconfiguration of power and its legitimation running across all aspects of society— military, political, economic, and cultural—and not just as a series of effects of the rise of capitalism

Summary

Introduction

This paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. I provide a synoptic history of the development of the vernacular concept of competition in English from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, drawing especially on historical dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

Results

Conclusion