'Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul Margaret Thatcher 1 May 1981 Sunday Times', Margaret Thatcher 1 May 1981 Sunday Times

Introduction

Throughout the twentieth century, the good society – depicted as an ideal social order of the future – and its institutional as well as social arrangements were not only conceptualized by political scientists or philosophers, but also by economists. The project aims at providing a history of the key concepts that coined economic thought‟s social imagination from the 1930s until today by analyzing transnational networks of economists, here understood as normative actors that act within a framework of structural constructivism, and national political implementations both in Europe and beyond. Four sub-projects deal with the economists‟ networks and the interplay between them and the national arenas in which the conceptualizations of economic order and social imagination unfold. To get a full European grasp, four projects deal with different parts of Europe (North, South-West, Central and East), and one sub-project connects European history and historical agency to its colonial heritage through an analysis of Ghana and another African country and how key concepts and networks connect this part of Africa to Europe and the wider global governance infrastructure. Accordingly, the project follows a twofold approach in order to reach an analysis of the normative conceptualization of society through economic thought: 1) concrete historical networks will be followed through the focus on key actors within these networks from the 1930s until today; 2) the semantics of economic thought are under scrutiny by applying a conceptual historical approach to key documents, debates, and dialogues.

The collaborative research project explores the networks of liberal economists, intellectuals, journalists and politicians that emerged in the 1930s in Europe with vital links to the United States. This network spread and evolved globally over the last seventy years and recent scholarship begins to follow its traces (Wegmann 2002; Walpen 2004; Plehwe, Walpen et al. 2005; Denord 2007; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). Here, the research interest lies on the question as to how the transnational value negotiations were implemented in the context of national semantics and traditions. Against the backdrop of today‟s economic crisis and the semantic insecurities still dominating European and US politics in the face of rising populism, research on the relations between transnational economic networks and national political spaces is of high relevance.

Research Framework at Aarhus University

The project pools and supports the interests of four scholars at Danish universities who have over the last years developed an expertise in the innovative field of transnational conceptual history of economic thought. The group will be strategically placed at the section for International and European Studies where it serves two main goals: 1) to further strengthen the research environment in International Studies and 2) to enable a dialogue between International Studies and other sections and research groups in the new department structure of Aarhus University‟s Department of Culture and Society. Thematically and methodologically, two VELUX-supported research projects connect to this proposal: a) Mikkel Thorup‟s Economic Argumentation – Economy’s Conflict with Religion and Natural Science as Knowledge and Agency Authorities, which is concerned with the inner logics of economic thought in relation to religion and natural sciences. Since Towards Good Society looks at semantics of the social, the synergy between Thorup‟s group and this project will be very productive on all levels of research; b) Frederik Stjernfelt‟s Humanomics. Mapping the Humanities is especially interesting regarding the methodological overlaps between semiotics and historical semantics proposed here. Furthermore, Stjernfelt‟s focus on the relation between the humanities and natural as well as social sciences is inspiring because of the very nature of economic thought as a genre characterized by all three academic faculties. The humanistic influence on economic thought is arguably the least prominent of the three. To historicize economic thought and conceptualize it as social and political agency brings history, and thus the humanities, to the foreground and embeds the economic into the social, and the political. Beyond the two other VELUX-funded projects, two new research units located at the Department of Culture and Society provide a framework for the project: one on Transnational Modernities and one on Modern European History. The latter because of the expertise on European and global history represented in the research group and the former because it pools a string of scholars from different disciplines focusing on research questions with both a transnational and a network analysis perspective. Internationally, the here proposed collaborative research project is already quite established through its members, Hagen Schulz-Forberg and Niklas Olsen. In fact, Schulz-Forberg and Olsen have recently organized an international workshop on the topic of liberal thought after the Second World War which took place in October 2012. (See Appendix A) The international connections will be strengthened to the same degree as the Danish and wider Nordic links. Main Goals, Innovations and Relevance The main goal of Towards Good Society is to show historical entanglements of economic thought and agency in Europe and beyond both over time and space. Over time, it spans from the 1930s until today, thus linking the Great Depression with the Second World War, the Cold War and today‟s experience of intensive globalization. Over space, it importantly links all parts of Europe, be they Western, Northern, Southern, or, indeed, Eastern European through the whole stretch of the period. The consequence of the transnational approach is to make spaces in which concepts unfold equally valid. Thus, a hierarchical relation between regions – e.g. often pre-constructed by a centre-periphery approach – can be avoided and a more objective and realistic perspective on historical entanglements and their impact is gained. Furthermore, Towards Good Society adds a (post)colonial perspective to European history by bringing in the links between European conceptualizations of the social and the economic and African cases as an example of conceptual appropriation and its unfolding in new historical contexts and semantic fields.

This research goal brings forth a number of necessary innovations in regard to historical method, theory, and research design. As highlighted in the sub-title of the project, a move from national histories to a transnational history is a precondition – with consequences for the practice of history as an interdisciplinary science. While transnational history and a transnational approach in the social sciences and humanities has been called for since many years, a convincing methodology and theory dealing with the transfer and translation as well as the appropriation of key concepts remains a lacuna. While the so-called new historicism (Greenblatt 1991; Todorov 1999; Greenblatt 2010) moved towards this direction, it is unfortunately not a strong influence on transnational history today despite its focus on circulation, contextualization and appropriation. Beyond the focus on a high number of publications on metropolises, movements, migration and mobility, transnational history has, however, recently moved into more traditional backwaters of historiography by focusing on diplomatic and political history of international organizations such as the League of Nations (Clavin and Wessel 2005; Sluga 2011). Historical network analysis as carried out, for example, by Wolfram Kaiser et al., is still an exception (Kaiser, Leucht et al. 2010). In political science as in European integration history the focus is mainly on institutional history and on the effect and influence the European institutions have on the nation-state in the tradition of Alan Milward‟s European Rescue of the Nation-state and on the Europeanization of national memories as a critical approach to contemporary history (Milward 1992; Jarausch, Lindenberger et al. 2007; Palmowski 2011).The role of key concepts of political legitimacy and of economics as well as of social construction is understudied, however; especially its connection to networks rather than to institutions. While a lively tradition in conceptual and intellectual history exists and historical semantics in general gain in attraction (Leonhard 2001; Sartori 2008; Steinmetz 2011), a transnational conceptual history remains a lacuna. The relevance of this project lies on two major levels: a thematic and a historiographic one. Thematically, the transnational approach allows for insight into connections between concepts and actors against the background of today‟s crisis, which in many ways is a crisis of conceptual insecurity. Historiographically, conceptual history is applied to a transnational, even global perspective in order to understand Europe and its global connections in a more adequate way.

Future Research Emerging from the Project

Undoubtedly, the project will bring forth not only answers, but also relevant new questions and problem fields that are able to inspire further research. The development of a historically inspired theory of global modernity has only begun recently (Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010). Its fruitfulness is unquestioned, however (Salvati 2012). This theoretical innovation begs further research and questions regarding a historically informed political and social theory. By furthermore merging an archive-based, historical approach with cutting edge sociological approaches to networks and social as well as structural constructivism, the project will allow for follow-up questions on the level of methodology. Here, the conceptual approach adds new innovative perspectives, leading to questions regarding transfer, translation and legitimacy-building in transnational spaces. Finally, the project implements a new approach to study European history through a) its focus on economists rather than European institution-building, national comparison, or questions of identity, which have been studied extensively over the last decades, and through b) its four sub-projects that integrate a variety of European perspectives and actors regardless of their geographic locations as well as non-European, colonial perspectives thus understanding Europe as integrated into global settings.
Theory and Method
Theoretical Perspectives: Global Modernity and the Temporalization of the Good Society A polycentric understanding of global modernity serves as a point of departure rather than a Western-centric one. The concept of modernity is uncoupled from classical theories in which it is understood as a mode of economic and social organization and in which modernization is coined as a process that drives this modernity. It is re-coupled with a polycentric understanding of global change that is characterized by claims on the past and the future through a reference to present experience and where concepts are employed as the semantic carriers of pasts, presents, and futures.

One essential precondition for this endeavor is to use global modernity as a technical term, following for example Carola Dietze‟s suggestion to understand modernity as such (Dietze 2008), rather than a discursive term, and, furthermore, the exclusion of any form of temporalities of difference, or what I call with Reinhart Koselleck progressive comparison (Koselleck 1985), from the methodological and theoretical perspective employed as part of the heuristic framework. All economic and social concepts, their history and their entanglements are treated in an equal way, no matter where they were coined or performed. The imposition of progressive comparison, which refers to notions of being temporally ahead and behind, of needing to catch up, of installing roads towards successful development, of who should be part of the race ahead and who should be excluded, play an important role in history; and they have a decisive role in the construction of economic temporalities connected to a social imagination of the future. For example in globalization discourses the depiction of a negative future scenario is coupled with a loss of the comparatively more advanced position. It is part and parcel of modern logics of time.

Progressive comparison should not, however, inform any contemporary historiographic approach. The important task is thus to take normativity and the teleology produced by progressive comparison out of the theoretical approach towards historical change and to, rather, understand the historicity of temporalities as a crucial element of what describes modernity until our present day as well as the way in which experiences, imaginations and expectations are linked temporally through concepts and the normativities they create (Schinkel 2005). History is open-ended. New future scenarios and roads to a good society are born continuously through a process of critique and crisis. Economic thought and agency is one of the key disciplines that produces normative future horizons based on a constant reshuffling of the past in moments of crisis (asking: „how did we get to where we are now?‟) and the future as a way out of the crisis (asking: „how can we leave the crisis behind and move towards an alternative, stable future?‟). It is thus no surprise to find chapters or even whole books on „the new social order‟ or „the new society‟ as part and parcel of economic thought. Already Walter Lippmann wrote about a new social order (Lippmann 1933) and when one opens the latest intervention by Joseph Stiglitz about the current global financial crisis, the last chapter is entitled: „Toward a New Society‟ (Stiglitz 2010).

Modernity creates multiple normativities, and concepts are their building blocks. Concepts have a normative function because of their crucial position in all discourses of critique, crisis, and legitimate change because of their role in meaning-making processes (Koselleck 1959; Skinner 1969). Indeed, today the conceptual approach is regarded as a sophisticated way of avoiding the normative pitfalls of classical political theory (Palonen 2002; Palonen 2003; Palonen 2004). Through concepts a temporal horizon, a goal and a supposedly adequate movement towards this goal is semantically constructed. Temporal logics and the spaces in which they are proposed to unfold characterize the multiple normativities of global modernity. This does not imply a seemingly natural movement of history towards a converging normative horizon inherent in modernization theories and in some integration theories in which the tertium comparationis is a norm and not an open question.
Temporal logics are part and parcel of European and Western discourses of legitimate change, of inclusion and exclusion. These temporal logics comprise the need for change or transition and may also be called, with Peter Sloterdijk, Leitdifferenzen (guiding differences) (Sloterdijk 2009), both of a positively connoted, goal-oriented kind as well as those pointing towards a transition into unchartered and simply unimaginable futures, which install a concept as an exemplary positive norm and a counter-concept as an exemplary negative norm. Guiding differences have for a long time influenced conceptualizations of modernity. Advanced – backward, civilized-barbarous, holy-profane, moral-immoral, developed-underdeveloped (the latter is today euphemistically referred to as „emerging‟), etc. The theoretical claim of any transnational conceptual history that takes a global point of departure is thus that temporal logics are also inherent in non-Western discourses of legitimacy, inclusion and exclusion and that, indeed, it seems to be the case that variations of temporal logics have moved into Asian as well as African concepts of society and economics through the appropriation of Western thought, e.g. through the movement from cyclical to linear temporal logics. Leitdifferenzen inform the usage and define the role of concepts and counter-concepts in power struggles of claims for legitimacy. However, this does not allow the conclusion that this global phenomenon of the temporal logic of legitimacy claims makes for global sameness. Societies do not converge because semantic systems change their conceptual horizon through experience as well as through translation and appropriation of foreign concepts. Thus, while there is a constant discursive construction of roads that would lead towards good society, the characteristics of this good society and the ways to get there change over time. Economics is a key discipline regarding the construction of conceptual building blocks for these roads to good society. Method: Transnational Conceptual History, Networks and Actors Conceptual history is the main methodological tool employed. Concepts, such as civilization, equality, or full employment, will be analysed in their semantic fields and by looking at their counter-concepts. Through this approach, the argumentative lines can be followed and the way in which certain meanings gain the upper hand. But it also allows for the complexity of meanings as the same concept – for example property – may have very different semantic fields in different context.

To reach the research goal formulated above, i.e. to operationalise a transnational, possibly global conceptual history, a transnational approach must be thoroughly thought through. Therefore, two main innovations need to be developed and implemented: 1) the role of comparison in transnational history must be critically reappraised in order to leave methodological nationalism behind and operationalize a transnational approach that takes its point of departure beyond the nation while recognizing the nation as one of many global spaces (Werner and Zimmermann 2006), and 2) historical semantics must be transnationalised, because until today intellectual history, the history of ideas, or the history of concepts remains mainly a national enterprise. A long-established, rarely questioned rationale of comparison thus needs to be rethought and a methodological nationalism needs to be surmounted. As a third element, which is a spin-off from the main two fields of innovation, the study of concepts needs to be connected to political context, to the thicket of discourse and performance in which concepts unfold their power as key terms able to depict normative horizons. Concepts, thus, need to be coupled with agency.
Furthermore, concepts are continuously contested. Their semantics are rarely stable. Through concepts, normative horizons are constructed, towards which legitimate change should move forward through time.

Concepts do not simply exist, however. They are invoked and filled with meaning and legitimacy through agency. Actors who push for certain concepts – e.g. „self-determination‟, „freedom‟, „equality‟, „full employment‟ – can be understood as normative actors. Liberal economists are such normative actors.

To illustrate this feature of economic thought – and the fact that it is really about the society in which the economy is supposed to function perfectly – the trenches between John Maynard Keynes and other liberals of his time is a good example. The roots of disagreement were not logical or scientific; they were moral. In Maß and Mitte (1950), Wilhelm Röpke explained what he disliked about Keynes. He accused him of treachery towards civilization. Röpke claims on page 155 ff.: “Lord Keynes has not only demolished that, which was rotten, but because he preached a political economic pragmatism and waged war against principles that are deeply rooted in the moral-political soil, he became one of the strongest forces that lead to an undermining of norms, which is the core of today‟s social crisis.” What is at stake now, in the 1950s, is nothing less than the “correct embedding of the human being and the „ordre naturel‟ in a well-ordered and well-fenced market economy.” (Röpke 1950)

Today, when European politicians struggle against the demise of the Euro, it is obvious that economics are inextricably linked with society. The current European malaise can indeed be traced back to the time around the late 1970s and early 1980s mentioned above when a normative change towards a fundamental belief in the ordering powers of the market took place. It was assumed that market integration could be decoupled from social integration, which was a task left to the Member States. The tensions emerging from this Europeanization of the economic, tensions between the market and the social, have by now become obvious and European governments need to rush to the scene in order to avoid the collapse of the Euro by installing more effective political governance structures (Schulz-Forberg and Stråth 2010). Normative Agency

In order to allow for a qualitative, source- and archive-based analysis, key actors of the liberal networks are chosen and through their biographies, their letters and personal archives a link to the main thrust of the network is established while the research cases become clearly delineated and manageable. The actors – all are economists – analysed are understood as normative actors. Rather than understanding the group of economists engaged in think tanks and networks as an epistemic community (Haas 1992), Towards Good Society takes departure in Plehwe‟s notion of the comprehensive transnational discourse community (Plehwe 2010), but at the same time slightly differs from his conceptualization of the actors in question. While Plehwe convincingly adheres to the economists‟ networks as united by more than knowledge exchange and agenda setting – as Haas‟ epistemic community approach hints at – and sees economists as ideologically motivated movers of discursive borders and establishers of world views, the word „community‟ is problematic here. In many ways, there is too much disagreement and heterogeneity among many of the liberals in question to call them a community. At the same time they all are actively producing normative horizons towards which – and according to which – society should progress through economic growth. Thus, the concept of normative agency seems to be more adequate, also because not only economists gather in think tanks and networks spurred by the need felt that it would be necessary to safeguard Western civilization and its heritage, but also philosophers like Popper, public intellectuals like Lippmann, journalists, editors, politicians, businessmen, and generally convinced and engaged private individuals. Therefore, the economists studied in this project are conceptualized as normative actors; they consciously advocate a moral and normative world view and the social order fitting this view in various arenas: in academic, public, political, institutional, and cultural ones. Towards Good Society thus understands its historical actors not from a perspective of social constructivism, but rather from a perspective of structural constructivism (Kauppi 2005), which proposes that structures and institutions are constructed by actors and discourse, and criticizes social constructivism for a simplistic top-down understanding of the establishment of powerful discourses.

Between Field and Discourse in a Public Sphere?

The normative agency of the economists under scrutiny unfolds in spheres of influence, in public and academic debate and in expert input. Importantly, economists build their conceptual framework not from a purely national point of departure, but from transnational relations and exchanges between each other. The values and convictions deliberated transnationally are then projected onto national public spheres, and rarely vice versa. In many ways, national economists act as translators between the transnational expert discourse and the national arena. How can their agency be conceptualized? Surely, the classical categorization of Bourdieu – field, capital, habitus – applies; economists all share a certain habitus, their expertise and academic standing is their capital through which they position themselves in a field (Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu 1984). At the same time, the normativity of their agency is so pronounced that they can even be understood as doing more than interest representation, they are pushing a normative horizon and help establish governmentality in the sense of Foucault whose lectures on bio-politics from the late 1970s in which he developed the concept of governmentality deals precisely with the liberal normative hegemony (Foucault, Senellart et al. 2008). And, what is more, they act within a very influential part of the public sphere that is characterized by a grey zone between undemocratic expert influence and delineating the economic and social policies and strategies of political parties and are thus at the heart of democratic deliberations (Habermas 1996; Habermas, Wingert et al. 2001; Habermas, Crossley et al. 2004). In a way, the innovative question asked by Zimmermann and Favell about which of the three main social theoretical approaches may best account for Europe‟s democratic deficit can serve as a methodological blueprint for capturing the transnational networks of economists and their normative agency when all three perspectives provide equally relevant tools for understanding them. (Zimmermann and Favell 2011).

Analysis

Towards Good Society explores the history and impact of networks of liberal economists. All sub-projects derive their questions and their focus from this point of departure, and all sub-projects relate their findings back to it. Through this, a sophisticated critical entangled history will, hopefully, be achieved. The networks were institutionalized as scholarly networks, exchanges, meetings, and publications connected through research institutions, universities, publishing houses and think tanks as nodal points and journals, books and articles in the press as publication outlets.
In the 1930s, facing crisis and the demise of liberal thought and legitimacy, liberals from all camps were open-minded for a mutual dialogue despite stark differences between them. In a historical situation that was perceived by most liberal economists as one in which the liberal roots of European and Western thought were about to be eradicated, these differences became of second-rank importance and networks in connection with dedicated donors, publishing houses, research institutions and political support formed an umbrella under which characters such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich August Hayek, Milton Friedman and Michael Polanyi – all among a group of thinkers that would today be described as market-radical – debated with exponents of different variants of liberal thought such as the very influential public intellectual and US government consultant Walter Lippmann, the co-founder of German postwar social market economy, Wilhelm Röpke, the highly intellectual, Carl Schmitt-inspired Alexander Rüstow, as well as the French social democrat Robert Marjolin who would later become the director of the OECD, and the Christian Italian resistance fighter, Luigi Einaudi, who later became the second prime minister of the Republic of Italy. The first major trace of this network was the so-called Walter Lippmann Colloquium, inspired by Lippmann‟s highly influential book on The Good Society (Lippmann 1937), that was held in Paris in August 1938 (Wegmann 2002; Denord 2007; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009) and brought forth the foundation of the short-lived Centre International d'Études pour la Rénovation du Libéralisme in Paris. It was at this meeting that the concept of neo-liberalism was born; then it connoted a social face of a market-based society, however, as opposed to today‟s market-radical meaning of the term.
Liberalism re-gained a stronger foothold in the late-1940s. Institutions, be it scientific networks and co-operations, think tanks, or research centres emerged. The Mont Pèlerin Society, founded by Friedrich von Hayek and some of his close colleagues such as Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Lionel Robbins and the young Milton Friedman in April 1947, picked up the pieces from the Walter Lippmann Colloquium and became one of the most influential economic think tanks in contemporary history, connected to thinks tanks, research centres and universities all over the world and bringing forth a string of nobel prize laureates, among them Hayek and Friedman themselves.

Following the Second World War, economists‟ networks in general spread through liberal-oriented think tanks, research institutions and international organizations such as the United Nations, that fully embraced the liberal worldview promoted by its predecessor, the League of Nations (Mazower 2009). The liberal camp also had a very clear opponent now: the collective economy of the Soviet Union and the social vision connected to it. Liberals were far from united, however, and in many ways the postwar order and its main governance institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement of Trades and Tariffs (GATT) – the so-called Bretton Woods institutions – represented a Keynesian variant of economic thought that embraced conscious regulations and government interference into the market when deemed necessary against which the emerging monetarist, Austrian school-inspired liberalism formed itself at Mont Pèlerin, actually claiming that liberalism were almost extinct, even within its natural habitat, the West.
From the late-1940s until the mid-1970s, economic growth in the new welfare state democracies confirmed the belief in economics as a trustworthy way of prognostics. The main national and international institutions had a clear Keynesian influence and the liberal vision of a global market integration emerged ever more strongly and was conceptualized as much more than merely trade, but as a guarantee for peace. The (free) market, democracy and peace were welded together in one semantic field, but markets were not regarded as completely self-regulating then. The conceptual shift towards a much more negative understanding of neo-liberalism occurred in the 1970s against the backdrop of the return of mass unemployment and the failure of all established tools of political economy to decrease the number of the unemployed. A conceptual insecurity emerged and a re-interpretation of key concepts took place, moving towards privatization, deregulation, and financial globalization. The discursive shift was accompanied by a generational shift that saw a new thinking coupled with new key figures. The Mont Pèlerin Society gained ever more in influence as it was able to advise leading politicians in ways different to the Keynesians. And, after all, they had worked on their key concepts in an intellectual struggle against both the collectivism of the Soviet Union and the tendency towards planning, regulating, and redistributing in parts of the West. When the crisis came, they had a fully-fledged answer and a global network to support it. It is well-known by now that the hegemony of this new neo-liberalism lasted until very recently and the Bretton Woods institutions became the leading agencies of a transcendental institutionalism (Sen 2009) regarding economic and social order, imposing conditionality on countries that entailed a clear liberal ideology of order which must be understood as nothing less than a liberal world order (Juergensmeyer 2008; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer et al. 2011). Recently, the G7 became G20 and China an accepted alternative market economy. Conditionality is toned down, and so is the confident call for a liberal world order. Which concepts will emerge as hegemonic in the near future? Which actors are pushing the agenda of economic thought and social imagination? And what is the history of the concepts through which they position themselves as avant-garde?