The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) can be seen as a watershed moment for politics in liberal democracies. It marked the end of a depoliticized, technocratic period that emerged in the immediate post-Cold War era, defined by ´third way’ politics, in which the political character of many decisions was obscured. The GFC refocused political attention to the importance of values and morals in defining political difference. In particular, it provided an opportunity for actors across the political spectrum to articulate values that challenged the status quo and hegemonic understandings of what constitutes the ‘good life’. While these sentiments often found expression in nativist and populist politics of exclusion, they also put forward a vision of solidarity, openness, fairness and justice that were adopted by progressive political forces.
The question of morals and values in politics and sociology is relatively undertheorized and understudied. Where morals do appear they are often simplified into easily measurable variables through public opinion polling. The contention of this project is that morals are much more complex social phenomena, drawing together identities, world views, knowledge and practices. And so the purpose of this project is to better understand what is the role of moral critique in delineating the frontiers of political conflict in Europe?
It does this across four broad objectives: re-theorising and reconceptualizing moral critique in the post-GFC period; historicizing political conflict by putting issues in their proper spatio-temporal contexts; identifying sites and actors that are articulating and legitimizing moral critique in the public sphere; using housing – and its relation to other issues – as important issue to compare moral critique in different countries.
The project drew three conclusions: moral critique implicates both the normative and the epistemic in the sense that what is known and knowable about crises relied on both our ability to identify and sort relevant facts and then judge them against an intersubjective set of pre-existing value commitments. This situation is, however, dynamic and crises provide opportunities to challenge and shift the established moral order, especially when actions of ourselves and others can no longer be justified in a way that makes social sense. Secondly, the intensification of multiple crises that are intersecting has increased the relevance and resonance of moral critique in political life and this is a phenomena likely to grow in importance. Lastly, if moral critique is to be better understood within the social sciences then special attention has to be paid to the historical and spatial contexts that produce it and multi-scalar analysis is necessary to understand regional, national and international moral orders.
