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Competition is deeply built into the structures of modern life. It can improve policies, products and services, but is also seen as a divisive burden that pits people against one another. This book seeks to go beyond such caricatures by advancing a new thesis about how competition came to shape our society. Jonathan Hearn argues that competition was 'domesticated', harnessed and institutionalised across a range of institutional spheres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to crises in traditional forms of authority (hereditary, religious), the formalisation of competition in the economy, politics, and diverse new forms of knowledge creation provided a new mode for legitimating distributions of power in the emerging liberal societies. This insightful study aims to improve our ability to think critically about competition, by better understanding its integral role, for good and ill, in how liberal forms of society work.

This essay reflects on the de-naming of the David Hume Tower at Edinburgh University in September 2020. It critically examines and contextualises the racist footnote written by Hume, that was the focus of calls to remove his name from the building. It argues that an opportunity was lost to ask deeper questions about the contribution of David Hume to current thought, and why we may want to commemorate historical figures, despite their flaws. In short, a 'teachable moment' was squandered in this event. I conclude by suggesting that such symbolic gestures as the de-naming of the David Hume Tower are not effective ways to oppose racism.

AbstractThis paper reframes the concept of competition, arguing that recent tendencies to frame it in the context of neoliberalism are too narrow to grasp its full significance. We need to see how it operates well beyond the capitalist economy, as a social and not just theoretical concept. I contextualise it in a deeper history, going back to the eighteenth century, beginning with an empirical examination of the development of the concept in English language dictionaries and encyclopaedias, using a method of 'conceptual history'. I show how the concept, its grammatical forms, and characteristic associations have evolved substantially since the eighteenth century. This finding is placed in a broader explanatory context, arguing that it is the combined rise of a set of core institutions of modernity, not just capitalism but also democracy, adversarial law, science, and civil society, that deeply embeds competition in the modern world. The decline of aristocratic and religious authority, and the national subordination of martial power, opened the way for more 'liberal' forms of society in which authority is routinely contested through competition, across economy, politics, culture and beliefs. Appreciating this is a necessary step towards truly grappling with the effects of competition on modern life.

This article challenges a set of common assumptions and misconceptions about nationalism and globalization. First, nationalism and globalization are historically entwined and reinforcing processes, and not fundamentally opposed to each other. Second—and closely related—the modern nation-state is premised on interdependence of economic and political forms of power, not their opposition. Third, nation-states are highly variable in their powers, resources, and alignments, and form an evolving system, making it difficult to say anything sensible about the "fate of the nation-state" in the abstract. Fourth, the variable composition of national identities and cultures is considerably more complex than a dichotomy between "ethnic" and "civic" types might suggest. Together, these arguments point toward the continuing need for an understanding of global processes as an outcome of the negotiation of powers between nation-states, not as autonomous shaping forces over and above nation-states.

What did Adam Smith understand by the term 'nation' in The Wealth of Nations? This article uses this relatively simple question as a way of exploring the roots of current debates about the concept of the nation, prevalent in the study of nationalism. I argue that contending senses, ethnic versus civic, cultural versus political, can be traced back to the formation of the modern concept in the eighteenth century, and that its current ambiguity, or multivocality, is also attributable to that original context. Basic here is the idea that the modern concept arose out of a general crisis, or at least destabilisation, of moral and political authority in that period. I argue that Smith's use of the word 'nation' was fairly conventional for the time, but that without fully intending to, his arguments for 'natural order' laid groundwork for imaginings of self-governing peoples, able to thrive without traditional or unified loci of authority. Smith's theories of emergent social order in the domains of morality and economy were also responses to the weakening of traditional authority, and crucial in the formation of modern concepts of society, which have been inextricably bound up with the idea of the nation-state.