Competition: A Critical History of a Concept

Beyond Neoliberalism and Capitalism, Vesna Stankovic Pejnovic, ed., Institute for Political Studies, Belgrade, pp. 157-171., 2021

By reason of the economic policies based on the market principle, such as privatization of public sector and deregulation, neoliberalism is often considered as a return to classical liberalism (laissez-faire in the sense of Adam Smith) or its modern application. However, in his lectures at Collège de France titled The Birth of Biopolitics (Naissance de la biopolitique, 1978-79), Michel Foucault analyzes in the radically different manner the idea of neoliberalism that has been formed since the 1930s in Germany and the United States. Paradoxically, he clarifies the significant role of "state interventionism" in neoliberalism: in order to make the logic of the market penetrate into the whole society, a state constructs the institutional frame by means of legislative intervention. In this article, we would like to clarify the particularity of neoliberal governmentality and subjectivity by following Foucault's analysis about neoliberalism.

Journal of Historical Sociology, 2021

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. 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 t...

Theory Culture & Society, 2014

This paper uses Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitics as a starting point for thinking historically about neoliberalism. Foucault's lectures offer a rich and detailed account of the emergence of neoliberalism, but this account is far from complete. This paper addresses some of the blind-spots in Foucault's lectures by focusing on the space between the decline of classical liberalism at the end of the 19th century and the subsequent attempt to develop a 'positive' or 'ordo' liberalism in postwar Germany. The primary concern of this paper is to chart the emergence of a new or neo-liberalism in the writings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek through the 1920s and 1930s. These writings, which are barely considered by Foucault, are important as they redefine the liberal project against the political economy of the late 19th century and, in particular, against the threat of socialism. In conclusion, it is argued that by returning to the work of Mises and Hayek it is possible to develop a critical sociology of neoliberalism, one that not only engages with the writings of these two thinkers but which also exposes the fracture lines that exist within the neoliberal project, and reconsiders the political positions that neoliberalism initially sought to reject.

The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, 2014

At SAGE we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using FSC papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the PREPS grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability. 1 THE DISENCHANTMENT OF POLITICS Neoliberalism, sovereignty and economics F riedrich Von Hayek believed that the intellectual, political and organizational forces of liberalism began a downward trajectory around 1870 (Hayek, 1944: 21). In place of the decentralized structure of the Victorian marketplace and British classical economics, came trends towards bureaucratization, management and the protection of the 'social' realm, all accompanied by a growing authority for German institutionalist and historicist ideas. By the 1940s this had reached the point of emergency. Having witnessed a financial crisis usher in Fascism, Keynesianism and then a world war, Hayek viewed the choices of political modernity in starkly binary terms: We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforeseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and "conscious" direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals. (1944: 21) Reversing this trend would mean restoring the political authority of 'impersonal' and 'anonymous' mechanisms, and of 'individual' and 'unconscious' forces in public life, which lack any 'deliberately chosen goals'. When Hayek looked back to the high period of British liberalism, what he mourned was a society that had no explicitly collective or public purpose, and whose direction could not be predicted or determined. The central function of markets in this nostalgic vision was to coordinate social activity without intervention by political authorities or 'conscious' cooperation by actors themselves. And if there were other ways of THE LIMITS OF NEOLIBERALISM 4 coordinating individuals' unconscious goals, impersonally and anonymously, these might be equally welcome as markets. The virtue of markets, for Hayek, was their capacity to replace egalitarian and idealist concepts of the common good that he believed could lead to tyranny.

New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 35(4): 604-626., 2013

Since the mid-1980s, and particularly throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the imperative of capitalist competition has become a totalizing and all-pervasive logic expanding to ever more social domains and geographical areas around the world. Sustained by neoliberal competition regulation and other regulatory provisions, excessive competition (over-competition) in the process of capital accumulation has become a major global force with highly detrimental social and environmental downsides . From the vantage point of a historical materialist perspective, the article provides an explanatory critique of capitalist competition and the atomistic and reductionist social scientific precepts that serve to legitimize the neoliberal type of competition regulation . By critically engaging with principles and values central to anarchism, such as equity, solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid and environmental sustainability, the article seeks to outline an alternative vision to the ideas and social practices that have sustained the existing competition order thus far.

New Political Science, 2013

Since the mid-1980s, and particularly throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, the imperative of capitalist competition has become a totalizing and all-pervasive logic expanding to ever more social domains and geographical areas around the world. Sustained by neoliberal competition regulation and other regulatory provisions, excessive competition (over-competition) in the process of capital accumulation has become a major global force with highly detrimental social and environmental downsides. From the vantage point of a historical materialist perspective, the article provides an explanatory critique of capitalist competition and the atomistic and reductionist social scientific precepts that serve to legitimize the neoliberal type of competition regulation. By critically engaging with principles and values central to anarchism, such as equity, solidarity, cooperation, mutual aid, and environmental sustainability, the article seeks to outline an alternative vision to the ideas and social practices that have sustained the existing competition order thus far.

2011

This article discusses two major conceptions of competition, the classical and the neoclassical. In the classical conception, competition is viewed as a dynamic rivalrous process of firms struggling with each other over the expansion of their market shares at the expense of their competitors. This dynamic view of competition characterizes mainly the works of Smith, Ricardo, J.S. Mill and Marx; a similar view can be also found in the writings of Austrian economists and the business literature. By contrast, the neoclassical conception of competition is derived from the requirements of a theory geared towards static equilibrium and not from any historical observation of the way in which firms actually organize and compete with each other.

Distinktion: Journal Of Social Theory, 2015