Liberalism and capitalism: what are the differences? A philosopher's point of view[Libéralisme et capitalisme : quelles différences ? Le point de vue d'une philosophe]

As part of the three annual conferences organized by the Society and Organizations Center for HEC students, this conference highlighted the conceptual and practical differences between liberalism and capitalism by comparing liberalism as defined by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations with the practices and rules of contemporary economy, practices and rules arising from a very different prism. In a second step, the philosophical analysis aimed to show why these differences were masked by the undifferentiated use of the terms liberalism and capitalism to describe the contemporary economy, this confusion being part of ideology, in the sense that Hannah Arendt defines it. Finally, the perpesctives opened by the difference between liberalism and capitalism were reviewed, in particular in the light of Wittgenstein's work on the rules of language games and John Rawls' Theory of Justice, with a view to highlighting what a market economy organised on liberal and non-capitalist bases could look like.