The Lucerne Master Class 2015 enables doctoral students from Switzerland and from abroad to deepen their understandings of the relationship between markets and democracy and to go beyond common patterns of perception. Doctoral students will receive the opportunity to present their work to the other participants and to discuss it with Prof. Wolfgang Streeck.

Markets and democracy function differently: one dollar, one vote the former, one man/woman, one vote the latter. Democratic politics with its egalitarian bent adjusts market outcomes to collective ideas of social justice; whereas markets reward winners and punish losers. Historically capitalists favored markets, and workers suspected them of plotting to abolish democracy. Conversely, workers often opposed the market economy, and capitalists were afraid of electoral majorities replacing it, and private property rights as well, with state planning. It was only in the «mixed economy» of the two or three decades after the Second World War that markets and democracy seemed to be birds of a feather. Since the 1970s, however, their relationship has again become unsettled as the neoliberal revolution has begun to set markets free from democratic-redistributive intervention. Deregulation, privatization, globalization are the key words now, announcing the construction of a new economic order free from democratic politics and governed by non-political «expert» institutions like independent central banks and international organizations – a development that was accompanied by a long-term «post-democratic» decline in political participation and a parallel increase in economic inequality. The Master Class is open to discussing these and other aspects of the relationship between markets and democracy, in the past as well as at present.

Call for Applications (event fully booked)