Friedrich Hayek’s account of “spontaneous order” has generated increasing interest in recent decades. His argument for the superiority of the market in distributing knowledge without the need for central oversight has appealed to progressive democratic theorists, who are wary of the hubris of state planning and attracted to possibilities for self-organization, and to Foucaultians, who have long counseled political theory to cut off the King’s head. A spontaneous social order, organized by an invisible hand, would appear to dispense with arbitrary (...) power and foster creativity and individual liberty. This article challenges this view by highlighting the centrality of submission to Hayek’s account of spontaneous order. It shows that Hayek struggles to obscure the providentialism underpinning the account of social order he derives from Adam Ferguson and the Scottish Enlightenment. Nonetheless, his own account of spontaneous order relies on faith in the workings of the market, and submission to unintelligible market forces. (shrink)

_Offers a striking new reading of Agamben’s political thought and its implications for political action in the present._.

_Offers a striking new reading of Agamben’s political thought and its implications for political action in the present._.

Agamben's vocabulary is both expansive and idiosyncratic, with words such as 'infancy', 'gesture' and 'profanation' given specific and complex meanings that can bewilder the new reader. Bringing together leading scholars in the field, including Steven DeCaroli, Justin Clemens, Claire Colebrook and Steven DeCaroli the 150 entries explain the key concepts in Agamben's work and his relationship with other thinkers, from Aristotle to Aby Warburg.

This article examines the consequences for the res publica of the simultaneous increase in state surveillance and the restriction of the right to take photographs in public ushered in by the War on Terror. We draw on Ariella Azoulay's theorization of what she terms the civil contract of photography, or the possibility for non-state civic interaction allowed by the invention of the camera. While Michel Foucault's studies of the role of constant surveillance in disciplinary societies help us to understand our (...) increasingly panoptical public spaces, Azoulay also draws on Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the state of exception, which enables us to better understand the restriction of established rights, including the right to take photographs, in the post-9/11 context. The article asks whether these developments signify an attempt to monopolize the decision as to who constitutes the citizenry of photography, and also considers artistic and political responses to surveillance and photography restrictions in Australia and the United Kingdom. (shrink)

Friedrich Hayek repeatedly stressed the centrality of submission to his own account of spontaneous order. In what he depicted as the rationalist refusal to submit to anything beyond human comprehension, he saw a threat to the “spontaneous order” of a market society. Kyong-Min Son’s criticism of my account of the neoliberal subject provides me with an opportunity to further specify my understanding of the submissive disposition of the Hayekian subject. In this brief reply, I defend the claim that Hayek saw (...) the complexity and opacity of the market order as constraining the possibility of collective political intervention that aims to alter the outcomes of market competition. While Hayek theorized a subject who was actively invested in the competitive “game,” the premise of this investment was submission to the rules of the market and acceptance of its outcomes as a form of fate. (shrink)

Capitalism is a system of selfish individualism. That is why it is so successful. Individualism is the idea that individuals should decide for themselves what they will do, including what they will produce and consume. Because an individual’s preferences both cause their actions and measure the value of their outcomes, individualism naturally promotes personal welfare. Understood as a tendency to give more weight to our own welfare than to others’, selfishness is an unavoidable—and welcome—feature of human life. Individualism protects each (...) of us against the selfishness of our fellow citizens, including the authorities. (shrink)

Capitalism is a system of selfish individualism. That is why it is so successful. Individualism is the idea that individuals should decide for themselves what they will do, including what they will produce and consume. Because an individual’s preferences both cause their actions and measure the value of their outcomes, individualism naturally promotes personal welfare. Understood as a tendency to give more weight to our own welfare than to others’, selfishness is an unavoidable—and welcome—feature of human life. Individualism protects each (...) of us against the selfishness of our fellow citizens, including the authorities. (shrink)

When is a society egalitarian? When is it a meritocracy? The answers to these questions are not as obvious as some seem to think.

The government claims that the important decisions it is now making are guided by principles that simply cannot be guiding them. Their decisions must in fact be guided by other considerations. Yet they prefer to peddle nonsense than to reveal their actual thinking (assuming there is some). Why? Why do politicians, who are experts in rhetoric and seek to win public favour, relentlessly and publicly indulge in shoddy reasoning?

Abstract Intentional mental states have causes and effects. Davidson has shown that this fact alone does not entail the existence of psycho?physical laws, but his anomalism makes the connection between the content and causation of intentional states utterly mysterious. By defining intentional states in terms of their causes and effects, functionalism promises to explain this connection. If intentional states have their causes and effects in virtue of their contents, then there must be intrinsic states (of the people who have them) (...) which are ?local causal surrogates? for the propositions believed, desired, or whatever. We can define these intrinsic states in terms of the laws that govern them, but these laws alone are not sufficient to account for intentional content. To do that we need to invoke laws which link these intrinsic states with their contents. Such a ?wide? functional account is sketched; it combines a suggestion of Ramsey's about truth conditions with a ?feedback? account of the content of desires. (shrink)

The government claims that the important decisions it is now making are guided by principles that simply cannot be guiding them. Their decisions must in fact be guided by other considerations. Yet they prefer to peddle nonsense than to reveal their actual thinking (assuming there is some). Why? Why do politicians, who are experts in rhetoric and seek to win public favour, relentlessly and publicly indulge in shoddy reasoning?