Imagined Economies: Austerity and the Moral Economy of ‘Fairness’

Abstract

In this article I aim to accomplish three things: first, I wish to explore the case for taking imagined economies seriously; second, I want to examine the austerity politics and policies of the U.K. Coalition government as one particular site of economic imagining; third, I will use this example to trace some of the ways in which imagined economies imply other relationships and orderings, not least of which is what E. P. Thompson (1963) called “moral economy.” I end by claiming that imagined economies need to be analyzed conjuncturally.