For quite some time contemporary political and social philosophy have regarded markets and financial institutions with ancillary interest. To illustrate: many political philosophers influenced by Rawls's A Theory of Justice dealt with markets only in terms of how they contribute to a just distribution of natural or social goods. And a large number of social philosophers, following Jürgen Habermas, regarded markets as "norm-free" social systems that can, at best, be justified from the standpoint of mere efficiency. Questions directly addressing the normative foundations and risks of markets were seldom accorded the same sort of attention.
This is no longer the case. For several years there have been calls to initiate philosophical discussions about the normative foundations and risks of markets. Several central questions have been raised: Are interactions in the market economy constituted through specific types of recognition, trust, or mutual esteem? What understandings of freedom and justice underlie these interactions? What opportunities for mutual esteem do markets open up? What risks of injury and exclusion do they bring about? How can markets actually contribute to a good life? What risks do they hold for the normative substance of individual life plans and social practices? The philosophical interest in such questions has been sustained by shifts in theoretical focus and by historical developments. A renaissance in the philosophy of recognition and markets' increasingly apparent vulnerability to crises have both played an important role in initiating and sustaining these discussions.
It is striking that this recent reorientation in contemporary political and social philosophy parallels several thematic interests pursued by eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophers. The German-speaking cameralists, Adam Smith, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, French utopian socialists, and the Left Hegelians (up through Karl Marx) all engaged with philosophical questions about what markets really are and about the normative potentials and dangers that they contain.
Two features distinguish the current renaissance in the philosophy of markets from its historical context. First, social-theoretical and ethical questions are often discussed in isolation from one another. Second, the systematic potential of the aforementioned 'classical' thinkers has not been fully developed and brought to bear upon contemporary questions. As a counterbalance to these trends our conference proposes to (1) address philosophical questions of the market in a coherent and interconnected fashion, and to (2) render the social-theoretical and ethical reflections of Smith, Hegel, Marx and others relevant for current philosophical debates about the market. It is our expectation that such a forum will not only be instructive for contemporary debates about markets but also for the history of philosophy insofar as it sheds new light on the related reflections of some of the most prominent thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.