Linsey Mcgoey
Biographic Data
| ID | 126125 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Linsey Mcgoey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Linsey |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgoey |
| SIGNATURE | MCGOEY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4404-2574 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 814 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The state of the state
Recent economic, democratic and geopolitical events have raised the question of ‘the state' anew, as problems of territory, sovereignty, protectionism, borders, authoritarianism and surveillance have acquired fresh salience amongst both scholars and wider publics. Members of the Economy & Society Editorial Board convened a seminar at University College London in February 2025 to address these questions and problems, on the guiding assumption that…
Hierarchies of White Advantage and Reciprist Epistemology
This article critically examines the legacy of Charles Mills’ concept of ‘white ignorance,’ raising concerns about the monolithic ways it frames white consciousness and advantage. I also examine conceptual problems with the wider field of ignorance studies. I suggest that critical engagement with the notion of ‘white ignorance’ helps to avoid re-fetishising racialized categories. It also helps to illuminate sometimes invisibilised cross-racial co…
All happy families
This forum contribution explores the strengths and limits of Noam Yuran's innovative call for a new political economy of sex and desire. It has three prongs. First, I discuss Yuran's compelling focus on the curious durability of monogamy as an institution. Second, I examine his analysis of thinkers such as Mandeville and Weber. Finally, I turn to the question of love. I suggest that Yuran's approach opens a pathway to a more loving and more reali…
The weaponry of racial capitalism: Gargi Bhattacharyya (2024) The futures of racial capitalism (Polity)
Liberal fatalism, Covid 19 and the politics of impossibility
How liberal governments manage knowledge, ignorance, prediction and uncertainty has attracted increased attention across the social sciences. In this paper, we analyse the strategy and rhetoric of the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention to the first half of 2020. We see the initial UK policy response – as well as its later legitimation – as a form of ‘politics of impossibility’, effecting political change through…
Nigel Dodd: An appreciation
Professor Nigel Dodd was a long-standing and much-loved member of the Editorial Board of Economy and Society. He sadly passed away in August 2022. In this short piece, we express our heartfelt gratitude for Nigel’s contributions to the journal and briefly introduce a virtual collection of 4 papers assembled to register our appreciation. The papers are free to access from the Collections section of our website throughout 2023, and include Nigel’s …
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies: Second Edition
Once treated as the absence of knowledge, ignorance today has become a highly influential topic in its own right, commanding growing attention across the natural and social sciences where a wide range of scholars have begun to explore the social life and political issues involved in the distribution and strategic use of not knowing. The field is growing fast and this handbook reflects this interdisciplinary field of study by drawing contributions…
Philanthrocapitalism and the Separation of Powers
This article discusses the rise of an approach to philanthropic giving known as philanthrocapitalism. I relate it to a new paradigm in management theory that has claimed that private profit making naturally aligns with improved public welfare. I show how growing belief in the inherent “compatibility” of corporate missions and public benefits has led to new laws and contributed to major shifts in how giving practices are structured and legitimated…
Micro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences
Linsey McGoeyMicro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences the beast of ignorance has been clawing at its cage, demanding more attention.For over 150 years, the social sciences have treated the problem of ignorance production as secondary to the problem of knowledge production.Ignorance has been sneered at like an uninvited guest at a high table, dismissed as an inferior, low-status cousin of knowledge.Recently, a few diners at the t…
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
Deliberate ignorance has been known as the ‘Ostrich Instruction’ in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people’s lives? Does the idea that knowledge is power still apply in today’s post-tr…
Strategic ignorance and global governance: An Ecumenical Approach to Epistemologies of Global Power
How can we account for the role of ignorance and knowledge in global governance? It is a contention of earlier scholarship in international relations and political sociology that knowledge production is tightly coupled with rational action - regardless of whether knowledge widely influences different stakeholders or not. This scholarship equally tends to assume an ignorance-knowledge binary relationship that associates ignorance with powerlessnes…
Le philanthrocapitalisme et les « crimes des dominants
Cet article a deux objectifs principaux. Dans une première partie, nous définissons la notion de « philanthrocapitalisme », un mouvement mondial qui prétend accroître l'efficacité de la philanthropie en appliquant les logiques de marché issues du monde de l'entreprise à la sphère caritative. À l'encontre d'autres analyses du philanthrocapitalisme, nous suggérons qu'une augmentation du volume des dons privés ne constitue pas une caractéristique in…
Bataille and the Sociology of Abundance: Reassessing Gifts, Debt and Economic Excess
Over the past 70 years, the sociological and economic study of economic abundance has been side-lined in comparison to the study of economic scarcity. This article calls for a revitalization of the study of abundance through a focus on the writing of Georges Bataille. I point out a number of parallels between Bataille and the work of two economists who are rarely associated with Bataille: John Maynard Keynes and Yanis Varoufakis. My argument is t…
Facts, power and global evidence: A New Empire of Truth
What are the epistemological and political contours of evidence today? This introduction to the special issue lays out key shifts in the contemporary politics of knowledge and describes the collective contribution of the six papers as an articulation of what we describe as a 'new empiricism', exploring how earlier historical appeals to evidence to defend political power and decision-making both chime with and differ from those of the contemporary…
Charismatic violence and the sanctification of the super-rich
Drawing historical comparisons between the nineteenth century and the present, this paper describes and analyses how an elite section of the global rich, through mega-giving and a re-emerging notion of 'noblesse oblige' that is enshrined in the philanthrocapitalism movement, have fostered a sacred rationale for their extreme wealth. Not only do the new nobles hold the power of wealth but, through mega-giving, they generate a moral imagery akin to…
The Elusive Rentier Rich: Piketty’s Data Battles and the Power of Absent Evidence
The popularity of Thomas Piketty's research on wealth inequality has drawn attention to a curious question: why was widening wealth inequality largely neglected by mainstream economists in recent decades? To explore and explain that neglect, I draw on the writing of the early neoclassical economist John Bates Clark, who introduced the notion of the marginal productivity of income distribution at the end of the nineteenth century. I then turn to P…
An Introduction to the Sociology of Ignorance: Essays on the Limits of Knowing
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies
The philanthropic state: Market–state hybrids in the philanthrocapitalist turn
Over the past decade a new form of philanthropy has emerged, termed ‘philanthrocapitalism’. Champions of philanthrocapitalism suggest that private giving can fill the void left by diminished government spending on social and development programmes. Critics suggest that philanthropy is no substitute for strong governmental support for social welfare. Both arguments perpetuate a dichotomy between the public and the private, implying that philanthro…
The logic of strategic ignorance
Ignorance and knowledge are often thought of as opposite phenomena. Knowledge is seen as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and corporate arenas. This article disputes this, exploring the ways that ignorance serves as a productive asset, helping individuals and institutions to command resources, deny liability in the aftermath of crises, and to assert expertise in the face of unpredictable outcom…
Philanthrocapitalism and its critics
Rationalities of ignorance: On Financial Crisis and the Ambivalence of Neo-Liberal Epistemology
The financial crisis of 2007–8 was experienced and reflected upon as a crisis of knowledge, the perennial question being why nobody accurately understood the risks that were being taken within the financial sector. In the wake of the crisis, there have been demands that rational economic knowledge be extended further and more vigorously, to prevent such ignorance being possible in future. At the same time, there have been demands for a new, softe…
Strategic unknowns: Towards a Sociology of Ignorance
Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the im…
The global health complex
The Risks of Prescription Drugs
Light, D.W. ( ed .) The Risks of Prescription Drugs . New York : Columbia University Press , 2010 , 184 pp. £10.50 (pbk ) ISBN: 978-0-231-14693 , £31.50 (hbk ), ISBN: 978-0-231-14692-0 When it comes to sociological studies of pharmaceuticals, the question among social scientists is not whether the global system for drug development and regulation is broken. The question is just how broken. In 2004, global financial markets reeled from the recall …
Strategic unknowns: Towards a Sociology of Ignorance
Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the im…
The logic of strategic ignorance
Ignorance and knowledge are often thought of as opposite phenomena. Knowledge is seen as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and corporate arenas. This article disputes this, exploring the ways that ignorance serves as a productive asset, helping individuals and institutions to command resources, deny liability in the aftermath of crises, and to assert expertise in the face of unpredictable outcom…
On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy
Drawing on narrative interviews with psychiatrists and health analysts in Britain, the article provides an analysis of debates over the safety of SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat. The focus of the article is on what I describe, drawing on Foucault, Nietzsche, Niklas Luhmann and Michael Power, as a 'will to ignorance' within regulatory bureaucracies which works to circumvent a regulator's ability to carry out its explicit aims and g…
Philanthrocapitalism and its critics
Rationalities of ignorance: On Financial Crisis and the Ambivalence of Neo-Liberal Epistemology
The financial crisis of 2007–8 was experienced and reflected upon as a crisis of knowledge, the perennial question being why nobody accurately understood the risks that were being taken within the financial sector. In the wake of the crisis, there have been demands that rational economic knowledge be extended further and more vigorously, to prevent such ignorance being possible in future. At the same time, there have been demands for a new, softe…
Facts, power and global evidence: A New Empire of Truth
What are the epistemological and political contours of evidence today? This introduction to the special issue lays out key shifts in the contemporary politics of knowledge and describes the collective contribution of the six papers as an articulation of what we describe as a 'new empiricism', exploring how earlier historical appeals to evidence to defend political power and decision-making both chime with and differ from those of the contemporary…
Pharmaceutical Controversies and the Performative Value of Uncertainty
In September 2004, the global pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck & Co. removed Vioxx from the US market. The company soon faced almost 30,000 lawsuits over the alleged concealment of adverse effects. Despite suspicions that the Vioxx scandal would cripple the company's profitability, Merck's shares more than doubled between 2005 and 2007. Drawing on this case, I describe how scientific uncertainty surrounding the effects of Vioxx has been legally …
The philanthropic state: Market–state hybrids in the philanthrocapitalist turn
Over the past decade a new form of philanthropy has emerged, termed ‘philanthrocapitalism’. Champions of philanthrocapitalism suggest that private giving can fill the void left by diminished government spending on social and development programmes. Critics suggest that philanthropy is no substitute for strong governmental support for social welfare. Both arguments perpetuate a dichotomy between the public and the private, implying that philanthro…
Charismatic violence and the sanctification of the super-rich
Drawing historical comparisons between the nineteenth century and the present, this paper describes and analyses how an elite section of the global rich, through mega-giving and a re-emerging notion of 'noblesse oblige' that is enshrined in the philanthrocapitalism movement, have fostered a sacred rationale for their extreme wealth. Not only do the new nobles hold the power of wealth but, through mega-giving, they generate a moral imagery akin to…
Strategic ignorance and global governance: An Ecumenical Approach to Epistemologies of Global Power
How can we account for the role of ignorance and knowledge in global governance? It is a contention of earlier scholarship in international relations and political sociology that knowledge production is tightly coupled with rational action - regardless of whether knowledge widely influences different stakeholders or not. This scholarship equally tends to assume an ignorance-knowledge binary relationship that associates ignorance with powerlessnes…
Profitable failure: Antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments
Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues' controversial 2008 article in "PLoS [Public Library of Science] Magazine" on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bou…
Philanthrocapitalism and the Separation of Powers
This article discusses the rise of an approach to philanthropic giving known as philanthrocapitalism. I relate it to a new paradigm in management theory that has claimed that private profit making naturally aligns with improved public welfare. I show how growing belief in the inherent “compatibility” of corporate missions and public benefits has led to new laws and contributed to major shifts in how giving practices are structured and legitimated…
The Elusive Rentier Rich: Piketty’s Data Battles and the Power of Absent Evidence
The popularity of Thomas Piketty's research on wealth inequality has drawn attention to a curious question: why was widening wealth inequality largely neglected by mainstream economists in recent decades? To explore and explain that neglect, I draw on the writing of the early neoclassical economist John Bates Clark, who introduced the notion of the marginal productivity of income distribution at the end of the nineteenth century. I then turn to P…
Micro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences
Linsey McGoeyMicro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences the beast of ignorance has been clawing at its cage, demanding more attention.For over 150 years, the social sciences have treated the problem of ignorance production as secondary to the problem of knowledge production.Ignorance has been sneered at like an uninvited guest at a high table, dismissed as an inferior, low-status cousin of knowledge.Recently, a few diners at the t…
Le philanthrocapitalisme et les « crimes des dominants
Cet article a deux objectifs principaux. Dans une première partie, nous définissons la notion de « philanthrocapitalisme », un mouvement mondial qui prétend accroître l'efficacité de la philanthropie en appliquant les logiques de marché issues du monde de l'entreprise à la sphère caritative. À l'encontre d'autres analyses du philanthrocapitalisme, nous suggérons qu'une augmentation du volume des dons privés ne constitue pas une caractéristique in…
Bataille and the Sociology of Abundance: Reassessing Gifts, Debt and Economic Excess
Over the past 70 years, the sociological and economic study of economic abundance has been side-lined in comparison to the study of economic scarcity. This article calls for a revitalization of the study of abundance through a focus on the writing of Georges Bataille. I point out a number of parallels between Bataille and the work of two economists who are rarely associated with Bataille: John Maynard Keynes and Yanis Varoufakis. My argument is t…
Liberal fatalism, Covid 19 and the politics of impossibility
How liberal governments manage knowledge, ignorance, prediction and uncertainty has attracted increased attention across the social sciences. In this paper, we analyse the strategy and rhetoric of the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention to the first half of 2020. We see the initial UK policy response – as well as its later legitimation – as a form of ‘politics of impossibility’, effecting political change through…
The weaponry of racial capitalism: Gargi Bhattacharyya (2024) The futures of racial capitalism (Polity)
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
Deliberate ignorance has been known as the ‘Ostrich Instruction’ in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people’s lives? Does the idea that knowledge is power still apply in today’s post-tr…
An Elusive Evidence Base: The Construction and Governance of Randomized Controlled Trials
Truth, Disclosure and the Influence of Industry on the Development of Nice Guidelines: An Interview with Tim Kendall
Pharmaceutical Hope
The Politics of Personalised Medicine: Pharmacogenetics in the Clinic - By Adam Hedgecoe
On the will to ignorance in bureaucracy
Drawing on narrative interviews with psychiatrists and health analysts in Britain, the article provides an analysis of debates over the safety of SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat. The focus of the article is on what I describe, drawing on Foucault, Nietzsche, Niklas Luhmann and Michael Power, as a 'will to ignorance' within regulatory bureaucracies which works to circumvent a regulator's ability to carry out its explicit aims and g…
Pharmaceutical Controversies and the Performative Value of Uncertainty
In September 2004, the global pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck & Co. removed Vioxx from the US market. The company soon faced almost 30,000 lawsuits over the alleged concealment of adverse effects. Despite suspicions that the Vioxx scandal would cripple the company's profitability, Merck's shares more than doubled between 2005 and 2007. Drawing on this case, I describe how scientific uncertainty surrounding the effects of Vioxx has been legally …
Profitable failure: Antidepressant drugs and the triumph of flawed experiments
Drawing on an analysis of Irving Kirsch and colleagues' controversial 2008 article in "PLoS [Public Library of Science] Magazine" on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, I examine flaws within the methodologies of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have made it difficult for regulators, clinicians and patients to determine the therapeutic value of this class of drug. I then argue, drawing analogies to work by Pierre Bou…
The global health complex
The Risks of Prescription Drugs
Light, D.W. ( ed .) The Risks of Prescription Drugs . New York : Columbia University Press , 2010 , 184 pp. £10.50 (pbk ) ISBN: 978-0-231-14693 , £31.50 (hbk ), ISBN: 978-0-231-14692-0 When it comes to sociological studies of pharmaceuticals, the question among social scientists is not whether the global system for drug development and regulation is broken. The question is just how broken. In 2004, global financial markets reeled from the recall …
The logic of strategic ignorance
Ignorance and knowledge are often thought of as opposite phenomena. Knowledge is seen as a source of power, and ignorance as a barrier to consolidating authority in political and corporate arenas. This article disputes this, exploring the ways that ignorance serves as a productive asset, helping individuals and institutions to command resources, deny liability in the aftermath of crises, and to assert expertise in the face of unpredictable outcom…
Philanthrocapitalism and its critics
Rationalities of ignorance: On Financial Crisis and the Ambivalence of Neo-Liberal Epistemology
The financial crisis of 2007–8 was experienced and reflected upon as a crisis of knowledge, the perennial question being why nobody accurately understood the risks that were being taken within the financial sector. In the wake of the crisis, there have been demands that rational economic knowledge be extended further and more vigorously, to prevent such ignorance being possible in future. At the same time, there have been demands for a new, softe…
Strategic unknowns: Towards a Sociology of Ignorance
Developing an agenda for the social study of ignorance, this paper introduces the sociology of strategic unknowns: the investigation of the multifaceted ways that ignorance can be harnessed as a resource, enabling knowledge to be deflected, obscured, concealed or magnified in a way that increases the scope of what remains unintelligible. In contrast to theoretical preoccupations that underlie the study of knowledge accumulation, a focus on the im…
The philanthropic state: Market–state hybrids in the philanthrocapitalist turn
Over the past decade a new form of philanthropy has emerged, termed ‘philanthrocapitalism’. Champions of philanthrocapitalism suggest that private giving can fill the void left by diminished government spending on social and development programmes. Critics suggest that philanthropy is no substitute for strong governmental support for social welfare. Both arguments perpetuate a dichotomy between the public and the private, implying that philanthro…
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies
An Introduction to the Sociology of Ignorance: Essays on the Limits of Knowing
The Elusive Rentier Rich: Piketty’s Data Battles and the Power of Absent Evidence
The popularity of Thomas Piketty's research on wealth inequality has drawn attention to a curious question: why was widening wealth inequality largely neglected by mainstream economists in recent decades? To explore and explain that neglect, I draw on the writing of the early neoclassical economist John Bates Clark, who introduced the notion of the marginal productivity of income distribution at the end of the nineteenth century. I then turn to P…
Strategic ignorance and global governance: An Ecumenical Approach to Epistemologies of Global Power
How can we account for the role of ignorance and knowledge in global governance? It is a contention of earlier scholarship in international relations and political sociology that knowledge production is tightly coupled with rational action - regardless of whether knowledge widely influences different stakeholders or not. This scholarship equally tends to assume an ignorance-knowledge binary relationship that associates ignorance with powerlessnes…
Le philanthrocapitalisme et les « crimes des dominants
Cet article a deux objectifs principaux. Dans une première partie, nous définissons la notion de « philanthrocapitalisme », un mouvement mondial qui prétend accroître l'efficacité de la philanthropie en appliquant les logiques de marché issues du monde de l'entreprise à la sphère caritative. À l'encontre d'autres analyses du philanthrocapitalisme, nous suggérons qu'une augmentation du volume des dons privés ne constitue pas une caractéristique in…
Bataille and the Sociology of Abundance: Reassessing Gifts, Debt and Economic Excess
Over the past 70 years, the sociological and economic study of economic abundance has been side-lined in comparison to the study of economic scarcity. This article calls for a revitalization of the study of abundance through a focus on the writing of Georges Bataille. I point out a number of parallels between Bataille and the work of two economists who are rarely associated with Bataille: John Maynard Keynes and Yanis Varoufakis. My argument is t…
Facts, power and global evidence: A New Empire of Truth
What are the epistemological and political contours of evidence today? This introduction to the special issue lays out key shifts in the contemporary politics of knowledge and describes the collective contribution of the six papers as an articulation of what we describe as a 'new empiricism', exploring how earlier historical appeals to evidence to defend political power and decision-making both chime with and differ from those of the contemporary…
Charismatic violence and the sanctification of the super-rich
Drawing historical comparisons between the nineteenth century and the present, this paper describes and analyses how an elite section of the global rich, through mega-giving and a re-emerging notion of 'noblesse oblige' that is enshrined in the philanthrocapitalism movement, have fostered a sacred rationale for their extreme wealth. Not only do the new nobles hold the power of wealth but, through mega-giving, they generate a moral imagery akin to…
The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
Deliberate ignorance has been known as the ‘Ostrich Instruction’ in law courts since the 1860s. It illustrates a recurring pattern in history in which figureheads for major companies, political leaders and industry bigwigs plead ignorance to avoid culpability. So why do so many figures at the top still get away with it when disasters on their watch damage so many people’s lives? Does the idea that knowledge is power still apply in today’s post-tr…
Micro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences
Linsey McGoeyMicro-Ignorance and Macro-Ignorance in the Social Sciences the beast of ignorance has been clawing at its cage, demanding more attention.For over 150 years, the social sciences have treated the problem of ignorance production as secondary to the problem of knowledge production.Ignorance has been sneered at like an uninvited guest at a high table, dismissed as an inferior, low-status cousin of knowledge.Recently, a few diners at the t…
Philanthrocapitalism and the Separation of Powers
This article discusses the rise of an approach to philanthropic giving known as philanthrocapitalism. I relate it to a new paradigm in management theory that has claimed that private profit making naturally aligns with improved public welfare. I show how growing belief in the inherent “compatibility” of corporate missions and public benefits has led to new laws and contributed to major shifts in how giving practices are structured and legitimated…
Political science (23 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Ignorance (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Law and economics (8 works)