"Critical Theory of Finance": Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Stefan Eich and Aaron Benanev in conversation with Paul North

For the last 50 years, finance played an ever-larger role on both the public and private sides of the world economy. And yet, finance hardly has a place in critical and philosophical accounts of capitalism. What Baran and Sweezy said about finance in 1966 still seems to apply in critical theory. "Since no new questions of principle are involved, there is no need for lengthy discussion of these activities and their economic significance.” In this dialogue we will discuss the ways finance does affect questions of principle. At a minimum, in the financial age, economic control is taken out of the hands of industry and government and put into the hands of investors and asset managers, and this alone is an enormous shift. In this event Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Stefan Eich, Aaron Benanev and Paul North will discuss interest, credit, exotic debt instruments, portfolio culture, and a world economy that by some estimates is 60% finance-related.

Wendy Brown is Professor Emerita in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her fields of interests include the history of political theory, feminist theory, contemporary critical theories of law, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, and contemporary American political culture. In recent years, her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise.

Melinda Cooper is Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her research focuses on the interaction between neoliberal and new conservative philosophies of power.

Stefan Eich is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. University. His research is in political theory and the history of political thought, in particular the political theory of money and financial capitalism.

Aaron Benanev is Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. He works at the intersection of history, sociology, and economic and social theory. His research focuses on global unemployment, underemployment, and informality; automation and the future of work; global histories of social and economic development; the history of economic and social statistics; and alternative institutional arrangements for organizing economic life.

Paul North is Professor of German at Yale University. He writes and teaches on literature and other media, continental philosophy, literary and critical theory. He is editor (along with Paul Reitter) of a new translation of Marx’s Capital.

NB - this event will run for 75 minutes.

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