Social Sciences Week:

The History of the Market: Opportunity or Imperative?

Online and in-person event, please register to join

Room 650, level 6, Social Sciences Building (A02).

What has the ‘market’ in capitalist society ever done for us? Is the ‘market’ an enabling force in our everyday lives, that unleashes prosperity, entrepreneurialism, unlimited economic growth, and asset inflation by way of offering choice and opportunity? Or, is there a concealed role to the ‘market’ that is more constraining in the way that it circumscribes our actions, limits and structures both individual and collective agency and ultimately ensures specific imperatives of competition, profit maximisation, and compulsion at the cost of socio-environmental degradation?

This Roundtable brings together leading political economists to examine critically the past and present history of the market. It does so by covering broad topics related to the organisation of financial markets (Claire Parfitt); the role of institutions such as the World Bank in facilitating private sector finance, rather than public funding (Susan Park); the presence of giant corporations in concentrating power and eschewing accountability (John Mikler); and how market society itself first came into being through acts of enclosure and its associated ideology of improvement.