Workshop on Political Philosophy and the Future of Capitalism
Questions about capitalism and its many discontents have acquired a new urgency in recent years. Economic inequalities have reached levels that seemed unthinkable a generation ago, contributing to political instability across the globe, and injecting new life into old questions about the viability and justifiability of capitalism. Globalization has transformed conditions of production and made work more precarious, rekindling old doubts about capitalism’s ability to provide minimally fulfilling forms of employment. And dazzling advances in automation have lent new relevance to old questions about mechanisation, prompting concerns about the place and nature of work in future capitalist societies.
In light of such developments, there is a pressing need for work in normative political theory that engages closely with the major economic issues of our time—investigating, for instance, whether a just capitalist society (or international order) is at all possible; whether alternative economic arrangements might prove preferable; and, more broadly, what place these questions should occupy in our normative theorizing. The workshop aims to bring together researchers whose work focuses on these and related topics at the intersection of political philosophy and economics.