Throughout the twentieth century, the good society – depicted as an ideal social order of the future – and its institutional as well as social arrangements were not only conceptualized by political scientists or philosophers, but also by economists. The project aims at providing a history of the key concepts that coined economic thought‟s social imagination from the 1930s until today by analyzing transnational networks of economists, here understood as normative actors that act within a framework of structural constructivism, and national political implementations both in Europe and beyond. Four sub-projects deal with the economists‟ networks and the interplay between them and the national arenas in which the conceptualizations of economic order and social imagination unfold. To get a full European grasp, three projects deal with different parts of Europe (North, South-West, and East), and one sub-project connects European history and historical agency to its colonial heritage through an analysis of Malaysia and Singapore and how key concepts and networks connect this part of Asia, a capitalist stronghold in many ways, to Europe. Accordingly, the project follows a twofold approach in order to reach an analysis of the normative conceptualization of society through economic thought: 1) concrete historical networks will be followed through the focus on key actors within these networks from the 1930s until today; 2) the semantics of economic thought are under scrutiny by applying a conceptual historical approach to key documents, debates, and dialogues.
The collaborative research project explores the networks of liberal economists, intellectuals, journalists and politicians that emerged in the 1930s in Europe with vital links to the United States. This network spread and evolved globally over the last seventy years and recent scholarship begins to follow its traces (Wegmann 2002; Walpen 2004; Plehwe, Walpen et al. 2005; Denord 2007; Mirowski and Plehwe 2009). Here, the research interest lies on the question as to how the transnational value negotiations were implemented in the context of national semantics and traditions. Against the backdrop of today‟s economic crisis and the semantic insecurities still dominating European and US politics in the face of rising populism, research on the relations between transnational economic networks and national political spaces is of high relevance.