Book Launch: ‘Reimagining Prosperity: Toward a New Imaginary of Law and Political Economy in the EU’

The historic task of the European Union (EU) today, this book argues, is to articulate and institute a new imaginary of prosperity. Imaginaries of prosperity integrate societies around the shared pursuit of a prosperous future, rendering 'political-economic' questions as the main preoccupation of politics.

The new imaginary of prosperity in the EU must be able to provide answers to contemporary societal challenges while also conjuring a world in which people want to live.

Through analyses of several policy fields, the book shows that the EU has already made modest strides in fostering more caring consumption, circular products and technologies, sustainable industry, and fairer corporate activity. But the EU must go further and faster if it hopes to respond effectively to Europe's problems, while arresting another descent into tribalism.

About the speaker

Marija Bartl is Professor of Transnational Private Law at the Amsterdam Law School. She is also a Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Transformative Private Law, the editor of European Law Open and a founding Co-president of European Law Unbound - Society.

She has taught many courses, including 'Private law in European and International Perspective', 'Law as a Change-Maker', 'Making Markets Beyond the State', 'European Contract Law' and 'Contractenrecht'. Marija has acquired her PhD from the European University Institute in Florence, with a thesis Legitimacy and European Private Law.

Marija has held appointments as a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute, a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School, Boston University and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law in Hamburg. She was also a Teaching Fellow at the VMU in Kaunas, Lithuania.