ABSTRACT Economics explains human prosperity as arising predominantly from a process of creative destruction: Successions of innovators create new wealth by conceiving and developing new higher productivity technologies that destroy, partially or completely, the wealth built by their predecessor technologies. Because higher productivity is, by definition, the production of more or more valued outputs from less or less costly inputs, creative destruction increases wealth over the long run. Economic models, in hopeful emulation of the natural sciences, are built from quantifiable probabilities and outcomes. However, new technologies are new creations of human minds, previously unconceived, let alone assigned probability distributions over well-defined outcomes. Economics must be more ambitious. Economics seeks to explain not merely decision-making in an expanding space of conceivable probabilities and outcomes, but decision making that causes that expansion. Behavioral economics reveals that humans rarely think in terms of quantitative probabilities and outcomes, but typically use narrative decision-making. Confronted with a problem, humans formulate a response by recalling and recombining narratives – actual or learned memories of problems, responses and outcomes, each triad with an emotional weight. New narratives arising as recombinations of existing narratives, and economically selected for higher productivity, potentially explains combinatorial economic growth.

ABSTRACT The German Wirtschaftswunder was not the result of economic expertise applied by Ludwig Erhard to postwar West Germany. There is no universally applicable theory-cum-practice of a “social market economy.” A capitalist economy is a political economy that requires an – always fragile – political settlement between capital and labour, one that needs to be re-negotiated on a current basis in the light of changing relations of power between the classes. To the extent that this requires expertise, it is the expertise of political practitioners, not of economists.“The economy” is not a second nature but a social battlefield.

ABSTRACT Proponents of private prisons rely on efficiency-based arguments but lack a normative framework to define the public goals incarceration should serve. Critics, drawing on communitarian republicanism, claim that only the state can legitimately administer punishment, but this outdated framework fails to reflect the complexities of modern governance. Neo-Roman republicanism offers a more contemporarily relevant normative framework by prioritizing freedom as non-domination. While private prisons could theoretically reduce domination, their profit-driven incentives and diminished accountability frequently exacerbate it. This analysis of private prisons can also provide valuable insights into the effects of privatization in other critical sectors.

ABSTRACT This article surveys research assessing and critiquing the doctrine of neoliberalism. I identify two defining characteristics of neoliberalism, its approach to competition and the state, and argue that what is often seen as a fundamental contradiction – the necessity of a strong state to protect the market – is in fact a reflection of the context in which neoliberalism developed. A discussion of some key applications of neoliberalism covers the role of central banks, the European project, transition, democracy, and Western civilization. I also identify an important limitation in the existing literature, namely a tendency for conspiracy theories to be employed to explain various aspects of neoliberalism’s intellectual origins and contemporary functioning. By challenging some of the weaker arguments made in this field, this article intends to contribute to a more analytically robust treatment of the political and economic philosophy known as neoliberalism.

ABSTRACT Recent studies of technocracy and populism contend that, despite their apparent incompatibility, they share a common rejection of pluralism and mediation. This makes their articulation much easier than what is traditionally assumed. This new interpretation, however, exaggerates their compatibility, precisely since it neglects the sphere of appearances. Comparing technocracy and populism at this level—that of political style and representation—reveals key political differences in terms of responsiveness, politicization, and mobilization. They introduce an inherent element of instability into any potential alignment, doomed to escalate in moments of crisis, as evidenced by the Czech political movement ANO.

ABSTRACT To cope with the complexity of the world, cognitively limited agents must employ framing to identify what is relevant and stabilise meaning. Yet democracy rests on the Popperian fallibilist imperative to break existing frames. Hence Hamlet’s problem: while fallibilism yields great epistemic benefits and grounds egalitarian ethos, the frame-breaking it invites leads to paralysis and distrust. Technocracy and populism can be then read as political responses to an essentially cognitive problem. A political environment capable of containing Hamlet’s problem must be self-organising and self-complexifying, to process dispersed knowledge inclusively, reconcile citizens to the tensions democracies generate, and secure public justification.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the productive heuristic possibilities of blending the Marxian critique of capital with Foucauldian studies on neoliberal governmentality. In so doing, we engage in a critical dialogue with both the tendency to break neoliberalism off from the history of capitalism (in the Foucauldian tradition) as well as those who see no need to introduce a new concept other than capital itself (more common among those following Marx). We stress that the process of capital accumulation—even if differentiated by its “regulated” and “neoliberal” forms—is not and can never be only about accumulating capital; it is always also about transforming society and politics, disciplining and controlling workers, and repurposing all life as “productive” resources. It is precisely for questions like this that Foucault is most usefully read, not as a refutation of Marx, but as an extension of his critique.

ABSTRACT Through an unprecedented deep dive in the converging aspects of German and French mid-century reforms, my book raises the issue of the place of technocratic governance in democracy – the current focal point of populist mobilization on both sides of the Atlantic. I endorse the more nuanced account of ordoliberalism offered by Wolfgang Streeck that is grounded in realpolitik, but I argue Streeck misunderstands my identification of expert governance as a successful, and possibly unavoidable, dimension of modern democracy as constituting a normative program. Peter Hall is worried too that my argument provides a slippery slope towards a form of expert authoritarianism. Conversely, I argue that liberals’ reluctance to oppose the senseless but very widespread conception of democracy-as-will-of-people causes them fall into a populist trap. I call for a reclaiming of the conceptual high ground by theorizing the necessary place of expertise in modern advanced democracies.

ABSTRACT The concept of sovereignty shapes our understanding of the world. Yet our current understanding of sovereignty conflates delegation of authority with loss of sovereignty. Delegation is relatively cheap, quick, and leads to an assured outcome; it’s an affirmation of sovereignty. Use of force, however, is required to regain lost sovereignty. I propose a definition of sovereignty that draws a clear distinction between sovereignty and delegated authority. Adopting this definition shows that sovereignty applies across time and space, it is indivisible, institutions do not place permanent constraints on supreme authority, and popular sovereignty is not a well-grounded concept.

ABSTRACT This essay critically examines Dan Greenwood’s Effective Governance and the Political Economy of Coordination. Greenwood’s book offers a compelling framework for evaluating government policy, drawing insights from the Austrian and Bloomington schools of political economy. His central argument is that governance is more effective at “steering” markets toward broad goals rather than directly providing goods and services. He builds this case on Hayekian concepts of complexity and dispersed knowledge, proposing a qualitative, stakeholder-focused approach to assess “coordinative effectiveness.” This review argues that Greenwood's analysis does not fully grapple with the dual problems of “radical dissonance” and “radical uncertainty.” Radical dissonance refers to the existence of opposing and often irreconcilable societal values and interests, while radical uncertainty points to the fundamental unpredictability of future outcomes. These issues, we contend, challenge the very possibility of achieving a neutral institutional framework to justify such steering. Any institutional design, including one based on general rules, inevitably has distributional consequences and creates path dependencies, making it a site of conflict as well as coordination. The review explores how these problems affect both first-order policy choices and second-order decisions about institutional rules, questioning whether widely shared principles for shaping market patterns can ever be truly established. Despite these criticisms, Greenwood's work is a uniquely successful and provocative contribution that bridges disparate literatures and stimulates crucial dialogue on the complex dimensions of governance.