Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy in India

Abstract

The dual rise of neoliberalism and economic nationalism is one of the defining features of our time. Moral Orders of Capitalist Legitimacy directly addresses this apparent paradox. It presents economic nationalism as a state-led project of moral ordering of capital. In the last few decades an important body of work has challenged the false dichotomy between state and market as drivers of development, growth and progress. This work has shown how states in both developing and industrialized countries play a fundamental role in shaping markets. This project builds on this work by unpacking the moral dimensions of economic policymaking. It shows how states design market rules to support business actors deemed to contribute positively to desired societal change while constraining those considered to be regressive market actors. This market architecture produces a hierarchical ordering of capital that is explicitly moral in character. While focusing on the Indian case, this project seeks to advance a broader argument about the moral ordering of capital in modern capitalism. It traces the intellectual roots of this ordering in classical political economy, shows how it has evolved historically through analysis of the treatment of domestic and foreign capital in colonial and post-independence India, and draws out implications for understanding state-market relationships within the contemporary global economy.

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