Rival views of economic competition

Abstract

Competition is a constitutive feature of capitalist societies. Social conflicts over the introduction, abolition and regulation of market organization are saturated with implicit moral arguments concerning the desirability of competition. Yet, unlike private property, exchange relations and social inequalities, economic competition has rarely been the explicit core of moral debates over capitalism. Drawing on a broad variety of social science literature, this article reconstructs, maps and systematizes ethical arguments about economic competition in capitalist societies. We discuss six contradictory rival views of economic competition and illustrate their influence by providing historical examples of the respective views in action in political-economic debates. This article serves as a mapping groundwork for reviving the systematic ethical debate on economic competition. In addition, our map of rival views lends itself to use as a structuring tool in empirical research on the moral economy and ideational embeddedness of capitalist societies, markets and firms.

Depoliticization and the continuity of neoliberal policies

“…Such actions have various manifestations in different economic policy domains: in the context of macroeconomic policy, they are translated into a preference for monetary policy over fiscal policy, and for lower public spending and taxation; in the context of welfare state and labor market policies, they are translated into policies that weaken the power of unions and coordination and into a preference of "social investment" over decommodification (Hemerijck 2018). They are also translated into a preference for enhancing competition in all economic and social domains (Ergen and Kohl 2020) and for financialization (Mader, Mertens, and van der Zwan 2019).…”

Putting Morals into Economics: From Value Neutrality to the Moral Economy and the Economization of Morality

“…To be sure, the ideational embeddedness of market society is not unchartered territory [Ergen and Kohl 2020]. In his tour d'horizon of interpretations of market society, Hirschman [1982] identified intellectual positions that view markets as civilizing, destructive, or feeble.…”