Inequality

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state-building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory statehood and the making of the Single Market in energy since the 1990s. European greening policies, we argue, have incrementally lessened the primacy of regulatory tools and have introduced a plethora of instruments to accelerate green restructuring and carbon unwinding. Best understood as a process of multi-sited institutional layering, the European Union increasingly appears to complement financial and regulatory instruments to effect green energy transitions with the management of decline in targeted regions and sectors, based on targeted funds and targeted transition planning.

Competition is a constitutive feature of capitalist societies. Social conflicts over the introduction, abolition and regulation of market organization are saturated with implicit moral arguments concerning the desirability of competition. Yet, unlike private property, exchange relations and social inequalities, economic competition has rarely been the explicit core of moral debates over capitalism. Drawing on a broad variety of social science literature, this article reconstructs, maps and systematizes ethical arguments about economic competition in capitalist societies. We discuss six contradictory rival views of economic competition and illustrate their influence by providing historical examples of the respective views in action in political-economic debates. This article serves as a mapping groundwork for reviving the systematic ethical debate on economic competition. In addition, our map of rival views lends itself to use as a structuring tool in empirical research on the moral economy and ideational embeddedness of capitalist societies, markets and firms.

Corporate concentration is currently being discussed as a core reason for the crisis of democratic capitalism. It is seen as a prime mover for wage stagnation and alienation, economic inequalities and discontent with democracy. A tacit coalition of progressive anti-monopoly critiques and small business promoters considers more deconcentrated corporate structures to be a panacea for the crisis of democratic capitalism, arguing that small firms in competition are better for employment, equality and democracy. This paper offers a brief outline of ideas of the anti-monopoly and small business ideal and critically evaluates whether a more deconcentrated economy may live up to these promises. While we agree that the plea for strengthened antitrust enforcement contains relevant and promising prospects for reform, our analysis concludes on a decidedly critical note. In particular, we caution against romanticized notions of the small capitalist firm.