Neoliberal Moral Economy

Jörg Wiegratz is Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the University of Leeds. He previously worked as a researcher and consultant in Uganda for the UN Industrial Development Organization, the Government of Uganda's Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Industry and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Economic Policy Research Centre, Kampala.He is author of Uganda's Human Resource Challenge: Training, Business Culture and Economic Development, co-editor of Uganda: The dynamics of neoliberal transformations, and co-editor of Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud. He has also published articles in New Political Economy, Journal of Agrarian Change, and Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE). He is a ROAPE editor, and coordinates the roape.net blog series on Economic trickery, fraud and crime in Africa, and Capitalism in Africa.

• Introduction : Rethinking moral economy: capitalism and the question of morals / 1. : Market-society-making: neoliberalism as a cultural programme / 2. Introducing Uganda: conflict, change and the neoliberal reforms / 3. The making of a neoliberal moral economy: tracing the moral contours of the new Uganda / 4. Neoliberalised markets and the intensification of fraud / 5. Neoliberal morals as weapons of the strong - the moral economy of power / 6. Neoliberalised worlds of business - the moral power of money / 7. Exploiting vulnerability: The moral economy of business with the squeezed bottom / 8. Seeing the neoliberal state: public-private partnerships of fraud / 9. The struggle for de-neoliberalisation: cultural resistance, moral turn-arounds, and the politics of moral economy / 10. Conclusion: Locking-in the moral order of capitalism: market society forever?

Neoliberalism promised a better economic world, it delivered economic wrong-doing on an industrial scale. In 'Neoliberal Moral Economy', Jörg Wiegratz provides a telling analysis of why. Focused on Uganda but ranging around the world, he shows how stressing markets full of self-regarding actors ends up encouraging values that justify both this self-regard and the harm it can cause others.