The events of the last weeks have made me wonder about the agenda of contemporary analytical political philosophy. There are many ways to describe the current financial crisis, but it’s not implausible to say that the foundations of capitalism are shaking. Yet I find little help in contemporary analytical political philosophy to help me understand what’s going on. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place. Perhaps I am ignorant. Perhaps I’m not trying hard enough (probably true given that there are so many other things that need to be done). Yet another explanation may be that in the last decades analytical political philosophers have focussed increasingly on issues to do with non-economic topics, or, as far as economic topics are concerned, on micro-economic topics and/or on issues of (re-)distribution or economic policies at the national/state level. Of course, there is quite a bit of related stuff – on the moral limits of the markets or on global justice for example. But are these literatures in themselves sufficient, or sufficiently integrated, to help us analyse capitalism? I doubt so.
I have friends and colleagues who work outside analytical political philosophy, have no background in economics at all, who are convinced they understand capitalism or neoliberalism and have strong normative views about these issues. So a possible thing for me to do would be to join them. Yet I have never found the ‘critical’ literatures they read very helpful – too rhetorical, too sweeping, insufficient analytical for my taste. Too much at the level of critique and deconstruction and too little at the level of helping us sort out the problems and propose constructive solutions. But at least the authors working in those literatures should be credited for having addressed crucial topics, which are, in my opinion, insufficiently addressed in the analytical tradition.
From informal talks over the last week I know I am not the only one with these doubts. Isn’t it time for a macro-economic turn in analytical political philosophy, that is, shouldn’t more of us put our efforts in analysing capitalism and alternative economic (global) systems, rather than focussing on micro-economic issues or non-economic issues? I suspect there is quite some (older?) literature out there, but that it just hasn’t been very fashionable in recent years. So what if we would start by collectively constructing a reading list on these issues for those who prefer to reason within the analytical tradition?