David V. Axelsen & Hartmut Rosa: “Can The Market Save Us?” (LSE PPE Research Seminar)

This event is organised by our BSc Philosophy, Politics and Economics students. It is FREE and OPEN TO ALL but registration is required. Please register via eventbrite. 

An air of upheaval has captured the West. From Covid-19 to climate change, from the financial crash to economic injustice, a series of never-ending crises has cast a growing shadow on a pillar of our liberal societies: the free market. Some consider the market an untamable mechanism that drives divisive disparities in its dogmatic pursuit of efficiency. Others commend its innovative capacity to foster autonomy and prosperity. At a time when policy-makers are torn between past ideologies and a paralysing status quo, how should we redefine the market’s role as a mode of socio-economic organisation? Should the logic of free exchange be constrained, even replaced by a new political project? Or might we harness the virtues of the market in smart policies that tackle the challenges of our age?

Join us in this discourse with Prof. Dr. Hartmut Rosa and Dr. David V. Axelsen

Prof Hartmut Rosa is a professor of sociology at Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and director of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt. He is also an alumnus of LSE where he spent a year during his undergraduate studies. Known for his contributions to the fields of communitarianism, sociology of time, formation of identity, and social theory, he is a distinguished scholar of new critical theory. He is the author of “Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity” (2005) and “Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality” (2010) and was awarded the “Werner Heisenberg-Medaille” as well as the “Rob Rhoads Global Citizenship Education Award” in 2020.

Dr David V. Axelsen is a Lecturer in the Government Department at the University of Essex. He has previously held positions as an LSE Fellow, Research Fellow & Lecturer and Visiting Research Fellow at the Government Department of the LSE, alongside academic positions at both the Universities of Warwick and Aarhus. David is known for his scholarship on distributive justice, global justice, inequality and political theory. His interdisciplinary work is at the cutting edge of politics and philosophy. He recently published “Big Data Justice: A Case for Regulating the Global Information Commons” (2020) and is the author of “Luck Egalitarianism Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and His Critics” (2019).