This article offers a critique of the market as a social imaginary. This article first outlines the connections between critique and imaginaries and how they link with postcolonial hierarchies and the limits to any emancipatory hope. The second section points to a specific epistemology of neoliberalism. Based on three notions of contingency, this article outlines three understandings of ‘critical’ projects: as identification of alternative empirics and alternatives, as mode of communication (communicative reason), and as a mode of organization/institutionalization of imaginaries. It shows how discourses around the neoliberal market translate critiques of the second and third level into a ‘critique’ in the first sense which gives dominance to quantitative forms of knowing and silences other forms of critiques.

On the same day Prof. Kessler (Erfurt) will also be host to TWO special events:

Meet the Editor - European Journal of International Relations

10-11am in room S6 and on Webex