The Future of
Liberalism 7-9 June 2022
International Conference

Japan, France and Germany
in global context

Venue: online Zoom
Language:
June 7 English/Japanese
simultaneous interpretation provided

June 8 and 9 English
Registration:
register here
登録する

s’inscrire

Organizers:

French Research Institute on Japan at the
Maison franco-japonaise
German Institute for Japanese Studies
Nippon Institute for Research Advancement

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

INTRODUCTION
The evolution of human societies can be seen to be supported by
the rise of dominant narratives – religions or political ideologies,
which in turn reflect the technological regimes of the times.
Technology changes not only our means of production; it influences
how we interact with our environment, how we perceive ourselves
and our place in the world and what we consider as “good” or“bad”. The present revolutions in information technology andbioscience seem to contradict the basic assumptions of liberalism.
Platform monopolies, fake news and surveillance capitalism equally
undermine liberal institutions.
The present pandemic has also dramatically questioned the liberalfoundations of public policies and governance in democratic
regimes. The restrictive policy measures adopted in the fight against
Covid-19 have produced “illiberal” outcomes similar to the stancestaken by populist political parties. High-level constraints impact
individual liberties, responsibility, social cohesion and/or social
control, but also free trade, competitiveness and market regulation.
How far are citizens prepared to accept trade-offs between civil
liberties and public guarantees regarding health, environment, andsafety? How are these constraints dealt with in so-called “liberal” orneoliberal” democratic countries?
The above issue is of central and essential concern for Japan andEurope and their relationships with neighbors and major partners.
Taking into consideration growing pressure from a more competitiveenvironment, Japan and Europe need to redefine their understandingof core values with regard to economic, social and individual
rights to redirect their relationships not only at an intellectual anddiscursive level, e.g. science and “soft-power”, but also in practicalterms such as national and international policies.
Rather than falling into the trap of cultural and civilizational
determinism, this symposium aims to stress sociopolitical,
philosophical and economic logics at work in the process of changes
in production and exchange caused by the transformation oftechnological regimes and the ongoing global crisis. In doing so, we
also intend to shed renewed light on the reception and the evolutionof the liberal ideology in Asia and Europe, especially in Japan,
France and Germany.

2

The Future of Liberalism
Japan, France and Germany in global context
7-9 June 2022

PROGR AMDay One: June 7

4:45-6:15

Liberalism(s)/Neoliberalism(s): concepts,
theories, debates II — Liberalism andNeo-liberalism as Basic Sustainable Values• Serge Audier (Sorbonne Paris 4)• Tsutomu Hashimoto (Hokkaido University)• Yufei Zhou (Teikyo University)

6:15-6:30

Break

6:30-7:45

Liberalism(s)/Neoliberalism(s): concepts,
theories, debates III — Liberalism andCapitalism in Historical and Philosophical
Perspective• Valérie Charolles (Institut Mines-Télécom 		Business School, EHESS/CNRS)• Nikita Dhawan (TU Dresden)• Shinji Nohara (University of Tokyo)

7:45-8:30

General discussion

4:30 pm – 7:45 pm (JST) / 9:30 am – 12:45 pm (CET)Moderators: Gilles Campagnolo (IFRJ-MFJ),
Adrienne Sala (IFRJ-MFJ)
4:30-4:45

Opening remarks
Philippe Setton, Ambassador of the French
Republic to Japan
Clemens von Goetze, Ambassador of the Federal
Republic of Germany to Japan

4:45-4:50

Introduction
by Bernard Thomann, Director of the FrenchInstitute of Research on Japan at the Maison
franco-japonaise

4:50-5:00

Presentation of the symposium by its initiators
Gilles Campagnolo and Adrienne Sala (IFRJ-MFJ)

5:00-5:45

Keynote speech: A Brief History of Equality
Thomas Piketty (EHESS)

5:45-6:30

Round tablewith Thomas Piketty (EHESS),
Lisa Herzog (University of Groningen), andShigeki Uno (University of Tokyo)

6:30-7:40

General discussion

7:40-7:45

Concluding remarks
by Franz Waldenberger, Director of the German
Institute for Japanese Studies

Day Two: June 83 pm – 8:30 pm (JST) / 8 am – 1:30 pm (CET)Day Three: June 94 pm – 8 pm (JST) / 9 am – 1 pm (CET)Moderators: Sébastien Lechevalier (IFRJ-MFJ),
Franz Waldenberger (German Institute forJapanese Studies)
4:00-5:30

Technology and Capitalism• Franz Waldenberger (German Institute for 		Japanese Studies)• Cedric Durand (Univ. de Genève)• Saori Shibata (Sheffield University)

5:30-5:45

Break

5:45-7:15

Technology, Digitalization and Ethics ofResponsibility• Yuko Harayama (Tohoku University)• Joanna J Bryson (Hertie School)• Mario Ionuț Maroșan (Univ. Laval)

7:15-8:00

General discussion and concluding remarks

Discussant: Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné (Skema Business
School, GREDEG)
Moderators: Gilles Campagnolo (IFRJ-MFJ),
Adrienne Sala (IFRJ-MFJ)
3:00-4:30

Liberalism(s)/Neoliberalism(s): concepts,
theories, debates I — Liberalism andUncertainty Facing Future Developments• Miriam Teschl (EHESS)• Richard Sturn (University of Graz)• Naoki Yoshihara (University of Massachusetts
Amherst)4:30-4:45

Break
3

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Serge Audier
Neoliberalism: The Word and the Things.
Some Reflections on the First Uses of a Changing Category
The word neoliberalism became central in the criticisms of capitalism in
the 1970s. Synonymous with “market fundamentalism”, it served to designate the policies of privatization and deregulation, in some countries – Chile,
Great Britain, United States – and the rules of globalization. However, in the
2000s, with the debates around the essence of European construction, theterm meant, among its opponents, German ordo-liberalism. Are all these
meanings identical, or do they reveal ambiguities in the category of neoliberalism? To deal with this question, we must first understand what the inventors of the word “neo-liberalism” meant in the years 1930-1950.

Serge Audier is Assistant professor at Sorbonne University in philosophy. He
is the author of, among others, Néo-libéralisme(s): une archéologie intellectuelle(Grasset, 2012); Le Colloque Lippmann: aux origines du néo-libéralisme (LeBord de l’eau, 2008 and 2012); Penser le néolibéralisme: le moment néolibéral,Foucault et la crise du socialisme (Le Bord de l’eau, 2015); The Walter Lippmann
Colloquium: The Birth of Neo-Liberalism (with Jurgen Reinhoudt), Palgrave, 2017.

4

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Joanna J Bryson
Why Technological Innovation Changes Governance,
but Not Responsibility
Sociality consists of well-recognised fundamental strategic tradeoffs, suchas between cooperation and competition, and despotism versus egalitarianism. This brief talk begins by explaining the established science of these two
tradeoffs, then proposes a new model of a third axis composed by governance structure and rule of law. I will show how this third axis allows us toadjust to new ideal tradeoffs on the other two. Shifts in ideal tradeoffs can becaused by the introduction of novel technologies, as well as by novel opportunities or constraints such as changes to climate or health. This leads to thefinal point which is that there can be no real innovation in responsibility:
where it is not held by those with executive power, the result is corruption of
governance structure, resulting in a loss of capacity to construct and defend
public good.

Joanna J Bryson is an academic recognised for broad expertise on intelligence,
its nature, and its consequences. Holding two degrees each in psychology andAI (BA Chicago, MSc & MPhil Edinburgh, PhD MIT), Bryson is since 2020 theProfessor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School in Berlin. She is a founding
member of Hertie School’s Centre for Digital Governance, and one of Germany’snine nominated experts to the Global Partnership for AI, where she co-chairs
the committee on AI Governance. Bryson advises governments, corporations,and other agencies globally, particularly on AI policy. Her research has appearedin venues ranging from reddit to the journal Science. From 2002-2019 she was
Computer Science faculty at the University of Bath; she has also been affiliatedwith Harvard Psychology, Oxford Anthropology, The Mannheim Centre for Social
Science Research, The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition
Research, and the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. Her
present research focuses are the impacts of technology on human societies, andimproving models of governance for AI and digital technology.

5

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Valérie Charolles
The Distinction between Capitalism and Liberalism:
An Operational ConceptThis paper draws a distinction between liberalism and capitalism as two different forms of the market economy. It revisits Smith’s conception of theeconomy in The Wealth of Nations (1776) and compares it with the prevailing economic system. In making such comparisons, the article highlights four
major contradictions:
1/ labor without accounting value whereas it is the source of all wealth inSmith’s view; 2/ mechanisms of concentration and mergers & acquisitions at
the exact opposite of competition in the liberal corpus; 3/ widespread confusion between economic liberalism and a vanishing State; 4/ a horizon of accumulation of wealth and profit far different from the equilibrium approach ofSmith and the classics. It then elucidates the difficulty in recognizing these
discrepancies in the two systems and connects the issue to an insufficiently
clear vision of the economic field. The paper offers to stylize it around four
strata: practices, norms, theories, and discourses. In line with Wittgenstein’s
analysis about language (PI), it stresses the importance of the rules of thegame in the economic process. Through such a lens, we can understand that
confusion lies in discourses and differences in norms.

Valérie Charolles teaches at EHESS and conducts her research at the IIAC (ajoint research Center of the CNRS and EHESS), she holds a PhD in Philosophy
and a Doctoral Research Supervisor degree. Her work focuses on the constitutionof the contemporary subject and world through economy, quantification, andtechnology. A new edition of her first book (Liberalism against Capitalism, 2006)
was published in 2021 by Gallimard (Folio Essais).

6

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Nikita Dhawan
Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans:
Decolonizing Liberalisms and Neoliberalisms
Anchored in European Enlightenment, liberalism and neoliberalism presents
itself as a triumph of reason over superstition and of capitalism over feudalism and as a movement towards human progress. In the face of tyranny andauthoritarianism, liberal intellectuals enunciate ideals of equality and freedom as a way out of domination by fostering the rights of the individual,
the rule of law, and free market economy. However, any attempts at transforming political and economic structures runs the risk of producing effects
opposite to those intended. As has been pointed out by both scholars of Postcolonial and Holocaust Studies, the liberal quest for freedom and prosperity
brought with it slavery, totalitarianism, and genocide. Colonialism and theHolocaust are testimony to the fact that the progressive goals of the Enlightenment are deeply ambivalent and flawed. Rather than being a provincial
European phenomenon, the Enlightenment claimed that its emancipatory
ideas had universal validity and enforced this through colonialism. In mytalk I will outline, how despite the colonial and fascist violence that contaminate liberal norms and values of human rights and democracy, we must negotiate the contradictory consequences of the Enlightenment without taking
up an anti-Enlightenment stance. I will argue that the indispensability of the
Enlightenment in pursuing critical projects is to be thought together with theEurocentrism and Androcentrism plaguing its legacies, which are like pharmakon, both poison and medicine. To imagine postimperial futures, liberalism and neoliberalism must be decolonized.

Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at
the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on
global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the
Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit ofwomen’s and gender studies and in support of the women’s movement and theachievement of gender equality. She has held visiting fellowships at Universidad
de Costa Rica; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The Universityof Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University of California,
Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University,
South Korea; Columbia University, New York, USA. Selected publications include:
Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Decolonizing
Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a
Postcolonial World (ed., 2014); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges
and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from theEuropeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming).

7

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Cédric DurandIntellectual Monopoly and Profit Making
in the Digital Age
Scientia potentia est, knowledge is power. The old adage takes a darker
tune as our contemporary economies are dragged into Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism. The term, coined in the early 2010s by the Italian economist Ugo Pagano, refers to the enlargement and hardening of intellectual
property rights and the inclusion of knowledge among the capital assets offirms (Pagano, 2014). However, what is missing in the literature is a systematic account of intellectual monopolization beyond the direct impact of IPRs.
This is what this contribution is about. Building on most recent research,
it will present and illustrate three complementary mechanisms contributing to intellectual monopolization: a) appropriation of knowledge in the context of academic-business networks; b) appropriation of big data and c) theconcentration of organizational and design capabilities by Global Value
Chains (GVCs) leaders. In conclusion these mechanisms will be related tothe broader issue of the generation and uses of profits and crisis tendencies incapitalism.

Cédric Durand is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Geneva
and a member of the Centre d’économie Paris Nord. His research focuses on
the mutations of contemporary capitalism. Following the Marxist tradition andthe Regulation school, he studies unequal development in globalization, thefinancialization of economies and the processes of intellectual monopolization.
He is notably the author of Le capital fictif. How Finance Appropriates Our Future(2014) and Techno-feudalism. Critique of the digital economy. He is a regularcontributor to the online journal Contretemps and to Sidecar, the blog of the New
Left Review.

8

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Yuko Harayama
The History of Mankind Is Also
the History of Technology
Technologies intended to improve everyday life have sometimes had unexpected effects and even changed the social structure and value system. What
we observe today is increasing complexity in technology development and thetransformative power and impact on our society of the emerging technologies
such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), genome editing technology, and neuroscience technologies, which calls for socially responsible actions. Rethinking thedigital transformation that we are experiencing today in that context, andreferring to the work done at the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI), an international framework for artificial intelligence, in my presentation, I will try to
extract key issues that should be considered when aiming to “build a better
society”, as advocated by the concept of “Society 5.0”.

Yuko Harayama is a former Executive Director at RIKEN in charge ofinternational affairs, promotion of young researchers, and diversity. Prior tojoining RIKEN, Dr. Harayama spent five years at the Cabinet Office of Japan as
an Executive Member of the Council for Science, Technology and Innovation(CSTI), two years at the OECD as the Deputy Director of the Directorate for
Science, Technology and Industry (STI), and ten years at the Graduate School ofEngineering of Tohoku University as a professor of Science and Technology Policy.
Her experience prior to Tohoku University includes being a Fellow at the ResearchInstitute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI) in Japan and an AssistantProfessor in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Geneva. Dr.
Harayama holds a Ph.D. in Education Sciences and a Ph.D. in Economics bothfrom the University of Geneva. She has received Chevalier de la Légion d’honneurin 2011 and was awarded honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel in
2014.

9

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Tsutomu Hashimoto
On Spontaneous Well-being
In a couple of recent decades, various indicators havebeen proposed to measure the wealth of a country andthe well-being of its people in place of gross domestic
product. In 1990, the United Nations Development Programme created the “Human Development Index” basedon Sen’s capability approach. At the request of French
President Nicolas Sarkozy, a committee with members
including J. Stiglitz and A. Sen compiled its own national
wealth index, The Stiglitz Report, in 2009. The Japanese
government as well, has considered developing its own
index of happiness. A variety of indicators have been
proposed, but which indicators should be used and how
should we use them to guide national policies? What are
the principles that should guide us? These questions need
to be quested.
Regrettably, however, traditional normative theories
such as liberalism and communitarianism have been
indifferent to this issue. Almost all normative theories
have avoided philosophical considerations of the concepts of happiness and well-being. However, it is thisissue that modern economic thought should be explored.
I examined this issue in my book Principles of Freedom:
Ideas on the Welfare State to come (in Japanese, 2021)
and develops a philosophy of well-being by criticizing
the concepts of “utility” and “choice” that are placedon the basis of conventional economics.Well-being is abasic concept for thinking about happiness and welfare.
The chapter 5 of my book points out that the task ofthe theory of good life is to find a rational path between
an individual’s way of life and the prosperity of society. To respond to this question, I elaborated the conceptof the well-being from the viewpoint that every individual has infinite potentialities, as opposed to the common
theory that assumes finite “capacity” of each person.
On the other hand, since it is difficult to measure thetotal amount of well-being in a society, I argue that weneed mediating goals and certain conceptions of humanbeings to overcome this difficulty. This investigation
would also provide an answer to the question of whatindicators should be used to guide society. Then finally,
I developed the theory of “spontaneous well-being.”
This is the core theory of the book. In the past, Friedrichvon Hayek used the word “spontaneous order” to construct his own thought of liberalism. Inspired by Hayek’sideas, I developed a new theory of liberty or freedomthat incorporates the nature of spontaneity into humanphilosophy. Living a spontaneous good life is portrayed
as an integrated personality consisting of the following
four characteristics: “man of ignorance,” “spontaneous
fecundity,” “life with retrospection,” and “hospitalized
life.” This theory of spontaneous well-being goes beyond
Hayek’s ideas and provides a new vision of the welfare
state.

Tsutomu Hashimoto is a Professor of Hokkaido University and the presidentof the Synodos Institute of the International Studies in Japan. Tsutomu has
got a Ph.D. from Tokyo University and has published a number of books inJapanese; Principles of Freedom (Iwanami shoten 2021), The Minimalist Ethics ofConsumption and the Spirit of De-Capitalism (Chikuma-shobo 2021), Decoding
Max Weber (Kodansha 2019), Conditions of Empire (Kobundo 2008), The LostModernity (Kobundo 2013), Economic Ethics = What is your Ideology? (Kodansha2009) and so forth. He has been constructing his original normative theory ofliberalism, which he calls “spontanietism”, based on a Hayekian perspective. At
the same time, he has managed survey studies for many years on the rising middle
class with a new liberal consciousness in Japan.

10The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Mario Ionuț Maroșan
Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality:
Power, Truth and Technological Judgement
Peeling a potato with a knife is much more convenient, for example, thandoing it with your fingernails. In this sense, the technical tool is a good thing:it allows me to reach my goal much more quickly and efficiently than if I did
not have it. On the other hand, with this same technical tool, the knife, it isjust as possible for me to injure others, or even to kill them. Under these conditions, it is clear that the same technical tool can allow me to achieve different goals, goals that are clearly not equal on an ethical level. Therefore, we
could quickly conclude – in a fairly intuitive way – that it is not the technicaltool that is good or bad in itself, but that it is the use that we make of it thatis decisive. This is precisely why we come rather quickly to the conclusionthat technology can only be neutral. It is therefore interesting – but above all
relevant – to emphasize the fact that this thesis of the neutrality of technology
is not accidentally adopted by what could be called common sense, by thevast majority of us, but that it precisely has rather strong roots in our philosophical tradition. Four arguments will help us explore our theme: (i) technology contains potentialities independent of the initially pursued ends; (ii)our judgment on technology is conditioned by technology itself; (iii) technology is constituted in a global system, whereas the common argument of theuse of technology applies above all at a particular level; (iv) the ends pursued
by technology are usually vague or poorly formulated. Two potential questions emerge: is it possible to (re)think the place of technology in our societies
today? If so, how can we then think about political action beyond technicalsolutions?

Mario Ionuț Maroșan is a Ph.D. candidate in political philosophy at the Facultyof Philosophy of Université Laval. The current focus of his work are aesthetics
and hermeneutics, political conflicts and responses (violence, negotiation andconversation). He has published on metaphysical monism and pluralism: thephilosophical question concerning technology and nihilism occupies his latest
research.

11

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Shinji Nohara
Adam Smith and the Institutional Basis of Liberalism
Adam Smith is known as the founder of the market mechanism, the conceptthat is the basis of liberalism. Especially, in economics, liberalism is linked
with freedom of behavior in an economy. A market mechanism allows people to behave freely without any social harm. Liberalism, nonetheless, is notwithout its institutional basis. Smith examined how the market mechanism
was based on current moral and political institutions. Smith expounded on
first of all, moral institutions such as justice and customs. By interacting, people can share their rules of behavior and include those for justice. Those rules
are the foundation of social rules under which people can act freely withoutharming others. Moral institutions were one of the basic concepts of Smith’sliberalism. For him, liberalism was also based on political institutions thatwere far more problematic for Smith. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith criticized the mercantilist policy that was so connected with the establishmentof political institutions. He believed these institutions could distort the basic
market mechanism. Nonetheless, he realized that political institutions werenecessary for the market mechanism to work. Thus, it could be argued thatliberalism might require institutions that people could use to produce behavior rules. Unlike Hayek, for Smith, these institutions were not necessarily traditional, and people could change their institutions. Smith emphasized thatsocial conditions were what determined which institutions were necessary
and should continue.

Shinji Nohara is an Associate Professor of the Graduate School of Economics
at the University of Tokyo. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Kyoto University,and his fields of specialization are history of social and economic thought, Adam
Smith, the Enlightenment, and the origins of the idea “commercial society”. Hejoined the University of Tokyo in 2014 after working as part-time lecturer at Kansai
University. He has also been a visiting scholar at the Faculty of History, Universityof Cambridge in 2017. His books include Commerce and Strangers in Adam Smithpublished by Springer (2018). He has also published in journals such as Journal of
the History of Economic Thought, Adam Smith Review, and The Kyoto Economic
Review.

12

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Thomas Piketty
A Brief History of Equality
It’s easy to be pessimistic about inequality. We know it has increased dramatically in many parts of the world over the past two generations. No one
has done more to reveal the problem than Thomas Piketty. Now, in this surprising and powerful new work, Piketty reminds us that the grand sweep ofhistory gives us reasons to be optimistic. Over the centuries, he shows, wehave been moving toward greater equality. Piketty guides us with eleganceand concision through the great movements that have made the modern
world for better and worse: the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery, wars, and the building of the welfare state. It’s a history of violence and social struggle, punctuated by regression and disaster. But throughit all, Piketty shows, human societies have moved fitfully toward a more justdistribution of income and assets, a reduction of racial and gender inequalities, and greater access to health care, education, and the rights of citizenship. Our rough march forward is political and ideological, an endless fightagainst injustice. To keep moving, Piketty argues, we need to learn and commit to what works, to institutional, legal, social, fiscal, and educational systems that can make equality a lasting reality. At the same time, we need toresist historical amnesia and the temptations of cultural separatism and intellectual compartmentalization. At stake is the quality of life for billions ofpeople. We know we can do better, Piketty concludes. The past shows us
how. The future is up to us.

Thomas Piketty is Professor at EHESS and at the Paris School of Economics.
He is the author of research articles published in journals such as the Quarterly
Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic
Review, the Review of Economic Studies, Explorations in Economic History,
Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. He has done historical and theoreticalwork on the interplay between economic development, the distribution of income
and wealth, and political conflict. These works have led to emphasize the roleof political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income andwealth distribution. Thomas Piketty is also co-director of the World Inequality Lab
and the World Inequality Database, and one of initiators of the Manifesto for the
democratization of Europe. He is the author of the international best-sellers Capitalin the 21st century (2014) and Capital and ideology (2020).

13

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Saori Shibata
De-skilling and Diminishing Workers’ Autonomy
in the Digital Workplace
The Covid-19 economic crisis prompted further discussions on the advanceof already existing processes of automation and its benefits. Robots andmachines do not get sick nor require safety measures in the same way thathumans do, and therefore represent less of a risk for employers. They canincrease productivity and contribute to the creation of new products and services. Digitalization in the workplace, however, also leads to new challenges
for labour. Moves towards the automation of human labour and digitalisation in the workplace therefore require our consideration, with a specificfocus on the post-Covid-19 crisis era. This paper considers concerns regarding the impact of advanced machines and technologies in the newly emerging
digital workplace. It highlights the potential acceleration of the de-skilling of workers, intensification of work due to surveillance enhanced by digital devices and the capacity of automation to lock precarious workers into
low-skilled work for the long term. It shows how the digital workplace has
seen diminishing workers’ autonomy in spite of certain advantages associatedwith digitization.

Saori Shibata is a Lecturer in East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield,
School of East Asian Studies (SEAS). She completed a PhD in Political Science andInternational Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK in 2015, and joined SEAS
in 2021 after working as lecturer in Political Economy of Japan at Leiden University(2014-2021). Her research focuses on Japan’s political economy, including thechanging nature of work, the digital economy, digitalization, and how Japan’s
model of capitalism is transforming. This draws on institutionalist approaches
to capitalism and critical political economy. She has published on these topics
in journals such as New Political Economy, Review of International Political
Economy, and British Journal of Political Science. She is the author of Contesting
Precarity in Japan: The Rise of Nonregular Workers and the New Policy Dissensus
published by Cornell University Press (2020).

14

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné
Liberalism and Sustainability
One compelling instrumental justification of economic
liberalism is expressed in this citation from 1974 Nobel
prize recipient Friedrich Hayek: “The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of thecircumstances of which we must make use never exists
in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictoryknowledge which all the separate individuals possess.
The economic problem of society is thus not merely aproblem of how to allocate “given” resources – if “given”
is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather
a problem of how to secure the best use of resources
known to any of the members of society, for ends whose
relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to
put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality”.
The fact that no single mind, machine or oligarchy could
ever hold all the knowledge and knowhow necessary
to support society’s wellbeing requires indeed to grantpeople enough latitude and incentives so they altogether
willingly deliver for the public good. This brings abouta fundamental challenge: to foster laisser-faire, while atthe same time deterring unproductive or destructive initiatives. Meeting this challenge rests on institutions.
Fine-tuning institutions is not an easy task. Peculiar
attention must be paid to the intricacies of multiple andoften overlapping contexts, cultures, norms and mindsets. History teaches us that making mistakes here canhave disastrous consequences. Furthermore, the past
decades have seen an additional desiderata being put on
institutional design – sustainability.
Many currently argue that the urgent imperatives of sustainability must tilt institutions away from laisser-faire,
for the latter appears to always lead to a tragedy of thecommons. The actual politics in several countries, theCovid-19 pandemic, the excesses of global finance, andthe disruptions of the digitalization era seem to provide
further support to this view. We will bring a critical but
pragmatic rejoinder on the issue, considering the specificcontexts of Japan, France and Germany.

Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné is Professor of Economics and CSR at Skema
Business School. Previously, he was for several years, and successively, Professor
at INSEAD, the École polytechnique de Montréal and HEC Montréal, and adjunct
Professor at École polytechnique- Paris. He holds a PhD in Management Scienceand Operations Research from Yale University. His main research areas are theeconomics of incentives and organization, environmental economics and policy,
risk management, and environmental innovation. His publications can be foundin major journals such as Econometrica, Management Science, the Journal ofLaw, Economics and Organization, and the Journal of Environmental Economics
and Management. His recent work focuses on incentive compensation andresponsible business, CSR and artificial intelligence, and the measurementof innovation. In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of the European Economic
Association. In 2006, he won (with co-author Pauline Barrieu of the London
School of Economics) the Finance and Sustainability European Research Awardfor the article “On Precautionary Policies” published in Management Science. In
2021, he was made a Fellow of the Louis Bachelier Institute. From 2008 to 2019,he was a member of the Commission de l’éthique en science et en technologie(CEST), which advises governments in Canada on ethical matters raised by the
deployment of new technologies.

15

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Richard Sturn
Politico-Economic Coevolution andthe Vicissitudes of Liberalism
The first session of the Colloque W. Lippmann (CWL)“Whether the decline of liberalism is due to endogenous
causes” dealt with the interdependence of economic andpolitical power associated with multiple interwar-period
crises. Ensuing debates at the CWL challenged “paleoliberalism”. While pertinent criticism implies a one-sided
account of past varieties of liberalism, it contributed tothe development of a cluster of politically activist varieties of liberalism, ranging from Ludwig Mises to German
Ordoliberalism: their differences notwithstanding, thecommon self-understanding refers to an activist perspective on the liberal order as a public agenda.
Analytical frameworks reflecting such a perspective conceptualize liberal constitutions as a higher order public good, crucially depending on modes of public choice
and accountability including individualist and plural values, polycentricity, and multi-sectoral co-evolution. In
this setting, the institutions of the liberal order co-evolvewith an economic sector endogenously generating innovation and transformational challenges.
Transformations bring about new unmediated coordination problems and social dilemmas, destroying old politico-economic equilibria and making some of the “oldregulations” obsolete, provoking new combinations andvarieties of liberalism as political movements, and moregenerally setting the stage for experimentation, variation,and shifts in governance institutions. In this context, itcannot be taken for granted that the relevant environmentof evolutionary selection of “new combinations” willbring about “beneficial” (in the sense of liberal values,
welfare, or some other normative consideration) shifts.
Unmediated coordination problems associated with possibilities of rent-shifting are becoming virulent as attractors for problematic kinds of semi-private governanceby oligarchs and “privatization” in rule making activities (“shadow politics”). Transformational environments
provide fuel for shadow politics, enhancing the potential for rent-shifting associated with a new profile of regulatory and coordinative challenges triggered by the newtechnologies (including institutional technologies such as
blockchain) and new modes of production. This in general poses challenges for modernizing the public sector.
More specifically, the current transformation includes
economies of scale/scope and regulatory challenges of
new dimensions.
While digitalization potentially provides better information systems supporting refined micro–accountability, it could exacerbate existing accountability deficits byundermining the public–private architecture (a constitutive feature of liberalism) – a digital accountability paradox. Unless the information-processing potential of
digital technologies is embedded in the constitutional–
political architecture supporting feedback processes insuitable ways, this may be accompanied by illiberal mixtures of “surveillance capitalism” and “surveillance
statism”.

Richard Sturn studied economics at the University of Vienna (doctorate 1988).
1996 habilitation and since 1997 professor at the Institute for Public Economics
in Graz. From 2004 to October 2007 research dean of the Faculty of Social andEconomic Sciences at the University of Graz. Since 2006 head of the Instituteof Public Economics. 2015 Joseph A. Schumpeter Professor for Innovation,
Development and Growth and Head of the Graz Schumpeter Center. Guest
professorships at the University of Minnesota, USA, at the University of Lyon
and currently at EHESS/Aix-Marseille School of Economics. Member of various
scientific associations, including the standing committees “Economics and Ethics”(chairman 2017-21) and “History of Economics” of the Verein für Socialpolitik/
German Economic Association. Member of the board of the Verein fürSocialpolitik. Managing Editor of the European Journal of the History of Economic
Thought, Editor of the Jahrbuch Normative and institutionelle Grundfragen
der Ökonomik and member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Contextual
Economics: Schmollers Jahrbuch. Research interests: Evolutionary Political
Economy and Institutional Economics, Normative Economics, Economics andPhilosophy, History of Economic Thought.

16

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Miriam Teschl
Liberalism and Uncertainty
Given the global instability and uncertainty of our times, it is difficult to predict what the future of liberalism will be. The question, so I argue, should
rather be, which future(s) do we want to have and what can we do to best
achieve them. Yet, this does not mean that we simply have to maximisea reframed or reconsidered objective function. The point is that if we areuncertain about the future, then it is difficult to engage in any maximising
exercise. By the same taken, it is difficult to think that we can find out “howfar citizens [are] prepared to accept trade-offs between civil liberties and public guarantees regarding health, environment, and safety”. This idea alone
presupposes a number of assumptions that may need to be discussed in aworld of uncertainty. First, it presupposes that there is a tension between civil
liberties and public guarantees regarding health. Second, it presupposes thatcivil liberties can be compared to health or environmental guarantees, possibly considering a common numéraire that measures respective preferences.
The question remains whether an optimal trade-off may be found, but if anuméraire exists, then the implication would be that people are indeed able
to make such trade-offs. In this presentation, I would like to elaborate on
the idea of uncertainty, and what uncertainty implies for our standard problem solving reasoning. This topic has of course been discussed in the past, so
I will present a tentative overview over some of the more recent discussions
on uncertainty in the literature and how uncertainty may have an epistemic
impact on our way to make decisions, but also on what kind of decision we
can make. This will eventually also impact on the understanding of liberalism. In fact, the argument I will develop in this presentation is that liberalism
will need to adopt an epistemic stance of uncertainty in order to keep being
liberal. Liberalism is often wedded to an (economic) notion of rationality andoptimisation, but it may be it is this combination that leads to illiberal decisions. I will end by giving an example of what it implies to endorse uncertainty for the most recent pandemic, briefly presenting joint research on anovel indicator measuring acceleration and deceleration of viral spread. This
is not so much to discuss the indicator as to show that uncertainty introduces
an epistemic change from asking what is it best to do to what can and do wewant to know.

Miriam Teschl is associate professor in economic philosophy at the École desHautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and is based at the Aix-Marseille
School of Economics (AMSE). This academic year, she is visiting researcher at
the Nova School for Business and Economics in Portugal. She is interested ininterdisciplinary questions of wellbeing, social justice, and, in particular, decisionmaking with competing motivations. More recently, she started, together withan interdisciplinary study group, to work on more epistemological questions
concerning what we can and want to know under uncertainty.

17

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Franz Waldenberger
Governance in a Knowledge Driven Society
Technology and capitalism are closely intertwined. The interdependence has
inspired research in a variety of areas, such as production functions, the firm,
market structure, economic growth, innovation and income distribution. In
my presentation, I will abandon the classical analysis of production based on
the combination of labor, capital and land, and apply a more straightforward
ecological approach, which had already been introduced by Kenneth Boulding in the late 1970s. Here the fundamental factors of production are matter,energy and knowledge. Production is defined as the transformation of matter by using energy and by applying knowledge. It becomes immediately clearthat knowledge is the only factor of production, which can be accumulated.
However, for knowledge to grow it needs to overcome the cognitive limitations of the human brain. This is achieved by division of labor. The presentation will elaborate on the governance implications of a “knowledge growth/division of labor-driven” evolution of economic systems.

Franz Waldenberger is Director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies,Tokyo. He is on leave from Munich University where he holds a professorship forJapanese Economy. His research focuses on the Japanese Economy, Corporate
Governance and the Digital Transformation. He received his PhD in economics
from Cologne University. He was visiting professor at the University of Tokyo,
Hitotsubashi University, the University of Tsukuba, Sophia University and Osaka
City University and Shimomura Fellow at the Research Institute of Capital
Formation (Development Bank of Japan). He is editor in chief of the international
peer reviewed journal Contemporary Japan. His recent publications include The
Future of Financial Systems in the Digital Age: Perspectives from Europe andJapan. Springer, 2022 (co-edited with M. Heckel) and The Digital Transformation– Implications for the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Miscellanea 21.
Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien, 2020 (co-edited with H. Kümmerle).

18

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Naoki Yoshihara
Liberalism in the Age of the Digital Economy
Liberal values are central to modern Western societies, core among which are freedom and respect for theindividual. However, given the social nature of humanbeings, it would be unwise to exclusively emphasize
the importance of personal freedom. Indeed, it is crucial for modern society to pursue a multiplicity of virtues, including not only individual freedom, but also theflourishing of the community, the development of democracy, and other aspects of social welfare. It is in this context that the doctrine of the “invisible hand,” associatedwith Adam Smith, was established at the core of classical liberalism: this idea has been viewed to imply thatthe promotion of personal liberty and the free market isindependently capable of sustaining a harmonious society. This theory is at least partially assumed to be verified by the Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics.
Needless to say, this theorem depends upon a number of stringent presumptions, and neoclassical microeconomics has shown the existence of various types ofmarket failure. Moreover, Amartya Sen (1970) showed
the so-called Pareto-Liberal Paradox, which proves theincompatibility between the claims of individual liberty
and the Pareto optimality of social outcomes. Given theliberal association of individual freedom and social welfare, this paradox may suggest the difficulty of a well-ordered liberal society.

Although it refers to a relatively abstract social environment, I would like to return to focus on the context ofthe market economy, to explore the tension between liberal institutions and economies with increasing returns
to scale. The rise of digital markets and the platform
economy over the past two decades has squarely put suchtechnologies in focus and in the spotlight. Indeed, there
is now a consensus among economists and policymakers
that one of the key characteristics of the digital economy
is its increasing returns to scale production technology
and its network effects.
Economies with increasing returns to scale may harm
the individual’s autonomy. For instance, the rise of thedigital economy has exacerbated concerns over unequal
distribution, particularly in a consequence of winnertake-all outcomes, which may threaten some individuals’
autonomy through the economic dominancy of a small
number of players.
To examine this issue, an idea of minimal autonomy isproposed, which the present society should respect when
it implements economic resource allocation. It would
be interesting to argue whether this condition can beensured by society with the increasing returns to scale.

Naoki Yoshihara is a Professor at the Department of Economics at the Universityof Massachusetts Amherst, the USA, and a Specially Appointed Professor at
the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University, Japan. Yoshihara
received the inaugural Encouragement Prize from the Japan Society of Political
Economy in 2010. Moreover, he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement
Award in Political Economy for the 21st Century by the World Association for
Political Economy in 2011. He has earned recognition nationally and worldwide
as being one of a small number of prominent scholars who are equally at homein mainstream economic theory and classical-Marxian economic theory. He
has published a lot of articles in highly recognized academic journals mainlyin economics, but also a few in philosophy and political sciences. His researchinterests are extremely broad and encompass a huge variety of subjects,
including axiomatic analysis of Marxian exploitation; axiomatic bargaining; Nash
implementation; non-welfarist approach to distributive justice; individual rights andsocial welfare, etc.

19

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

Yufei Zhou
From State Neoliberalism to Neo-Listianism: Transition of the
Dominant Economic Ideology in China in the 21st Century
Since the late 1970s, China has sought to reenter the capitalist world economy by implementing neoliberal policies, such as setting up institutionalframeworks, to guarantee private property rights and prompt free markets and free trade. Despite the popular backlash against market reform in
1988/1989, evoked primarily by the plan for price liberalization, the Chinese
neoliberal reform made deep inroads into the arenas of ownership, the labormarket, and the health care system. Interestingly, China retained an average annual growth rate of more than 10% during the “lost decades” of neoliberalism in most other developing countries. The increasing inequality anda series of events, most prominent among which was China’s accession to
the World Trade Organization in 2001, sparked vibrant debates between the
Chinese neoliberals and the new Left. This debate, which also drew extensively from New Confucianism, Postcolonialism, Cultural Conservatism, andother trends of thought, went far beyond questioning the legitimacy of theparty-controlled market economy. The advocates of these lines of thought,
regardless of their political conviction, also addressed the fictionality ofneoliberalism in history as well as in the present, as also the collusive ties
between the neoliberals and the interest groups of global capitalism. However, after the 2012 leadership transition, the discourse over the relations ofneoliberalism, developmentalism, and inequality swiftly faded away. Instead,the German national economist Friedrich List’s emphasis on nation-centeredeconomic development gained prominence. The Chinese “Neo-Listians”
gained unprecedented popularity and official support by reviving List’s theory to justify the significant state-controlled investment and financial plans,such as the “Belt and Road” Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, among others. This study first provides an overview of theagents, arenas, and publishing platforms of the contesting economic ideologies in China in the first two decades of the 21st century. Thereafter, it analyzes the rhetoric and arguments of various schools of economic thought
in responding to specific economic policies. Lastly, this study addresses themost recent drastic changes in China’s economic model after the China-US
Trade War and the pandemic-related crisis since 2020, as well as the freshly
emerging narratives around these changes.

Yufei Zhou is Lecturer for Modern Intellectual History and Social Thought at
Teikyo University in Tokyo. Her research focuses on the history of social policy
and social thoughts in modern East Asia. She has published a number of articles
in Japanese, English and Chinese on how the core concepts, such as capitalism,
despotism and so forth, were introduced and localized in the East Asian context.
Her first monograph Discovering ‘Oriental Society’: Karl August Wittfogel and theEast Asian Intellectuals is forthcoming under contract with Routledge. Currently,
she is focusing on the legacy of the German speaking economic thoughts inmodern East Asia.

20

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

ROUNDTABLEDISCUSSANTS

Lisa Herzog works at the intersection of political philosophy and economic
thought. Between 2016 and 2019, she was professor for political philosophy
and theory at the Technical University of Munich, since 2019 she works at theFaculty of Philosophy and the Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economicsof the University of Groningen. She holds a master (Diplom) in economics fromLMU Munich, and an M.St. in Philosophy and D.Phil. in Political Theory from the
University of Oxford. She has worked at, or visited, the universities of St. Gallen(CH), Leuven (BE), Frankfurt/Main (D), Utrecht (NL), and Stanford (US). She wasa Rhodes Scholar (2007-2011), and in 2019, she received the Tractatus-Preis andthe German Award for Philosophy and Social Ethics. Herzog has published on thephilosophical dimensions of markets (both historically and systemically), liberalism
and social justice, ethics in organizations and the future of work. The current
focus of her work are workplace democracy, professional ethics, and the role ofknowledge in democracies.

Shigeki Uno is an Executive Vice President of the Nippon Institute for Research
Advancement (NIRA) and a Professor at the Institute of Social Science, theUniversity of Tokyo. He completed a Ph.D. in Law and Politics from the Graduate
School of Law and Politics of The University of Tokyo. Professor Uno specializes
in the history of Western political thought and political philosophy. He took his
present position following terms in positions including as an Assistant Professor
in Chiba University’s Faculty of Law and Economics. He has conducted researchon democratic politics in the United States, France, and Japan, centering on thethinker Alexis de Tocqueville. Professor Uno is involved in community activities in
the Okinoshima Islands, Kamaishi City, and Fukui Prefecture. He received the 2005
Shibusawa-Claudel Prize for his book For Political Philosophy: Dialogues with
Contemporary French Political Philosophers (University of Tokyo Press, 2004), the2007 Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities for his book Tocqueville– Theorist of Equality and Inequality (Kodansha Academic Bunko, 2019), andthe 2021 Ishibashi Tanzan Prize for his book What is Democracy? (Kodansha
Contemporary Shinsho).

21

The Future of Liberalism Japan, France and Germany in global context 7-9 June 2022

MODERATORS

Gilles Campagnolo is a full Research Professor/Director at the French Natonal
Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)/French Research Institute on Japan at the
Maison franco-japonaise (FRIJ-MFJ). He is an Associate with the London Schoolof Economics (Center for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences). He
studied at Paris Ecole Normale Sup. and the Universities of Harvard and Tokyo.
He explores economic philosophy, co-edits the Review of Economic Philosophy(Paris, Vrin Pub. Co.) and researches sources of liberal thought and capitalist
development in a comparative perspective and contemporary theories between
Europe and East Asia. He coordinated the European Union program LIBEACLiberalism in Between Europe And China (EU-IRSES 2013-2017) and is currently
the PI of the program “Justice and Interest” of the National Institute for Social
Sciences and Humanities (InSHS).

Sébastien Lechevalier is an Economist and a Professor at EHESS (School of
Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris), specialised in Japanese economy
and Asian Capitalisms. He is also founder and president of the Fondation FranceJapon de l’EHESS (FFJ). He is currently researcher at Maison Franco-Japonaise(IFRJ-MFJ). Trained as a labor economist, he has extensively published on various
dimensions of the Japanese economy, in comparative perspective, including The
Great Transformation of Japanese Capitalism (Routledge, 2014). Other researchinterests include relations between science, technology, and society (Innovation
beyond technology, Springer, 2019), industrial policies (“Financialization andindustrial policies in Japan and Korea: Evolving complementarities and loss ofstate capabilities” in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 2019, Vol. 48),and inequalities & redistribution (“Why do Redistributive Policies Differ acrossCountries? Analyzing the Multiple Dimensions of Preferences for Redistribution”,
The Review of Income and Wealth, 2021).

Adrienne Sala is a researcher at the French Research Institute on Japan at the
Maison Franco-Japonaise (FRIJ-MFJ) and visiting researcher at the University ofTokyo, Institute of Social Science since September 2019. She is currently working
on sociopolitical issues related to Consumer Finance, Labor and Environmental
law evolution, legal mobilization and policy-making process in Japan. Since January
2021 she is coordinating the project “Judicialization of social and environmental
issues in France and Japan” at FRIJ-MFJ.

22