Inaugural conference: “Governing complex and diverse societies: Markets, politics, and justice”

Abstract

How should we govern societies that nobody fully understands, and in which people disagree about what justice requires? Modern societies are characterized by dispersed knowledge, pervasive uncertainty, and a plurality of competing interests and values. These features pose a fundamental challenge: how can we design institutions capable of coping with social complexity while satisfying the demands of political and economic justice?

This question lies at the heart of my research programme. In this lecture, I will retrace its development, beginning with my forthcoming book, L’Ordre dans l’Ignorance (ENS Editions, forthcoming). Through an examination of Hayek, Lippmann, Buchanan, and Posner, the book explores how neoliberal thinkers confronted a central problem of modern governance: institutions must organize social orders whose complexity escapes the knowledge and control of any single actor. Rather than simply opposing markets to government, these thinkers developed competing accounts of how rules and institutions could enable coordination under conditions of unavoidable ignorance.

Building on this diagnosis, my subsequent research investigates a central tension: institutions capable of handling social complexity are not necessarily those that satisfy our demands for justice. Markets illustrate this difficulty particularly well. Their capacity to coordinate dispersed knowledge does not, by itself, justify their institutional foundations or distributive consequences. Yet attempts to remedy injustice through collective decision-making face epistemic limitations of their own. This raises broader questions about structural injustice, political responsibility, democratic decision-making, and institutional design.

These tensions have progressively led me to investigate polycentric governance, understood as the distribution of political authority across multiple, partly autonomous centers of decision-making. By fostering institutional diversity, experimentation, and the use of local knowledge, polycentricity offers promising responses to complexity and pluralism, while raising new questions about equality and democratic legitimacy, particularly in debates concerning federalism, urban autonomy, and housing justice.

About the speaker

Assistant Professor at ESPOL in Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Nathanaël’s work focuses on neoliberal political theory and, more recently, theories of social justice in market and competitive situations.

About ESPOL-Lab conferences

ESPOL-Lab conferences take place in person on the Université Catholique de Lille campus. They are open to the entire university community and, upon registration, to participants from outside the university.

Whether you are a student, researcher, professional or simply curious to learn more, these events offer an opportunity to discover new research and engage directly with speakers.