Article
Hegel's "Objective Spirit", extended mind, and the institutional nature of economic action
Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an unrivalled and all-embracing system of thought, but often renounced with no less ardour. This book renews the dialogue with Hegel by looking at his legacy as a source of insight and judgement that helps us rethink contemporary economics. This book focuses on a concept of institution which is equally important for Hegel's political philosophy and for economic theory to date.
The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality.
This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.
This paper provides some comparison of Herzen’s and Hegel’s notions on philosophy of history and claims to represent Herzen, anatomizing the situation of European riots of the mid. 19th century, as а thinker of current interest. While Herzen asserts that history is a development process with no predetermined goal, Hegel (whose works were very important for Russian intellectuals of Herzen’s generation) proclaims that history has already ended with the Napoleon’s Empire and his own — Hegel’s — philosophy.
References to the problem of the End of History are not infrequent in various political, cultural and philosophic discussions. This notion is often postulated as something quite apparent or as something of great influence and which nevertheless both are attemted to be refuted. The purpose of the paper is to follow philosophic roots of this conception and observe conditions and stages in its development.
Performativity in action: Michel Callon's economy of qualities as a paradigm for sociological analysis of markets An alternative research program has been emerging in economic sociology in last decade. It rejects the critique of homo economicus in favour of examining why economic agents progressively resemble this economic conception of man. The new approach relies on thesis of performativity of economics, according to which the distribution of economic knowledge and technology dramatically changes economic practice, thereby increasing the verisimilitude of economic theories. Calculativeness can be considered now as a key feature of the man and his technological environment. This paper demonstrates how performativity thesis combined with the theory of monopolistic competition can provide a paradigm for economicsociological research of markets, which would be able to take full account of increasing structuring impact of economic technologies on economic practices.
Traditionally phenomenology was considered as the philosophical movement that pays no attention to the problem of medium understood as the material mediator of thinking process. Admittedly, this media-indifference of phenomenology results from its subjective-idealistic orientation. Acknowledging the truth of this retrospective interpretation the alternative look at the problem of relationship between phenomenology and media studies offered in this article is future-oriented and takes as its starting point the very idea of phenomenality considered as main theme of phenomenological researches. As opposed to plural and particular phenomena, holistic phenomenality allows us to think the object of phenomenological researches as a consistent field of primary appearance which embraces not only the objective structures of phenomenological experience, but also the subjective ones. In this sense primary phenomenality is the primordial medium of any appearance. The visual image (and its experience) is offered as the best model for explication of phenomenality understood in terms of mediality.
The Summer School is aimed at creating and supporting the academic network of young researchers from all regions of Russia as well as from CIS and other countries, who work in the field of New Institutional Economics. The schedule of the Summer School includes lectures, seminars and plenty of possibilities for discussion and communication. This year we will focus on possibilities and challenges of applied research in the institutional economics framework.