The political economy of ideas in an age of turbulence

For almost two decades, the world has experienced significantly heightened levels of uncertainty. How can ideational scholarship analyze changing ideas and discourses under these more turbulent circumstances, and which conceptual and theoretical adjustments can be made to put ideational scholarship on a firmer footing? The paper argues that theories about the political economy of ideas remain central to understanding political and institutional responses, but that the emergence of new forms of uncertainty in modern societies, raises questions about the continued capacity of ideational scholarship to account for institutional change and stability. This relates particularly to the reliance of early ideational scholarship on an understanding of social and political reality as shifting between long periods of stability – a world of risk – and short ruptures of massive change, characterized by uncertainty. Based on recent interventions in ideational scholarship, the paper argues that to build a deeper understanding of the political economy of ideas in an age of turbulence requires rethinking the key concepts of ideas, agency and change in a way that captures agents’ dynamic and pragmatic use of ideas to act and cooperate.