Moral Categories in the Financial Crisis: Discussion Forum

Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true, too: deep moral–political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources and the design of policy devices. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the short papers presented here by Philippe Steiner, Cornelia Woll, Wolfgang Streeck and Marion Fourcade propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy and call for a broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts and the sovereign debt crisis, the discussion forum builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.Marion Fourcade and Cornelia Woll: Introduction Philippe Steiner: High Wages in the Financial Crisis Cornelia Woll: The Morality of Rescuing Banks Wolfgang Streeck: The Construction of a Moral Duty for the Greek People to Repay their National Debt Marion Fourcade: The Economy as Morality Play, and Implications for the Eurozone Crisi