Maria Papova.

March 13, 2016

‘Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curved-line, constant pursuit.’

-Sarah Lewis

(‘Sarah received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard, an M. Phil from Oxford University, and her Ph.D. from Yale University in the History of Art.’)

Words matter.

The Guardian

Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary.

Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: “What is an economy for?”, “What do we want it to provide?”

Our current imaginings endow the market and its associated forms with a special status. We think of “the economy” in terms of natural forces, into which we occasionally intervene, rather than in terms of a whole variety of social relations that need some kind of co-ordination.

[…]

Above all, we need to bring economic vocabulary back into political contention, and to question the very way we think about the economy in the first place. For something new to be imagined, let alone to be born, our current economic “common sense” needs to be challenged root and branch.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/neoliberalism-hijacked-vocabulary