de goede - virtue, fortune, and faith; a genealogy of finance (2005)

[...]... seventeenth-century England and its associated gendered discourses of financial crisis; the slow imagination of a conceptual separation between gambling and finance and the articulation of risk as a calculable entity; the development of financial statistics in general and the Dow Jones Industrial Average in particular as representative measures of the market; and the politics of regulation and risk in... financial sphere I discuss some of the moral, religious, and political transformations that have slowly constructed the domain of finance as a legitimate, rational, and, above all, natural practice These transformations concern the way in which the virtue of financial practice was articulated in contrast to gendered representations of fortune, and the faith that underpins the imagination of finance as a. .. “global finance took flight and soared to new heights of power and influence in the affairs of nations” (Cohen 1996, 268 ; see also Cohen 2000) Benjamin Cohen’s metaphor attributes a large capacity of agency to an abstracted image of global finance The mythological phoenix bird symbolizes immortality and resurrection, and the image of finance as an immortal being, preying on the capacities of nation-states,... explosive political and social issues of the late nineteenth century” (1994, 14 ; see also Zelizer 1999) On one side of the debate were “gold-bugs,” who argued that irredeemable paper money was socially and morally unacceptable and that gold was the natural embodiment of (monetary) value Gold was argued to possess intrinsic value independent of authority and legislation, and “the fact that gold and silver... science These moral and political transformations should not be seen as secondary to or separate from the emergence of material financial networks, but are at the heart of the ways in which the institutions of modern finance have taken shape These debates have determined the legal, political, and moral spaces in which modern finance operates Moreover, the conceptual and moral struggles and debates documented... London, three detectives of Scotland Yard arrested Boggs and confiscated his artworks Boggs was questioned and released in the care of his solicitor in anticipation of the trial at the Old Bailey Boggs had begun his performance art around the themes of money and value about five years earlier, when a waitress in a Chicago diner accepted an impromptu drawing of a dollar bill as a payment for coffee and insisted... many thanks to Ana Clara Barbara, Alex Betancourt-Serrano, Phil Cerny, Teun van Dijk, John Hobson, Paul Langley, Mika Luoma-Aho, Christiane Miller, Katrin Mohr, Ronen Palan, Kees van der Pijl, Magnus Ryner, and Ralph I am grateful to the participants of the 2002 workshop “Approaches to Global Finance at the University of Warwick Many thanks to Timothy Sinclair, who has supported my work for many years... calculating and reducing of qualitative values to quantitative ones” (1990, 444) The depersonalizing effects of money are seen to be exacerbated by modern financial developments such as deregulation and dematerialization of finance For instance, David Harvey establishes his influential critique of late modern capitalism partly by arguing that it reduces rich social bonds to instrumental, superficial,... assumption that in economics and finance there exists a prepolitical domain of material economic reality and shifts attention to the historical and discursive processes through which a domain we now call finance has materialized.6 In addition, it provides a contrast to notions of performance in conventional economic and financial analysis The work of financial analysts professes to measure and comment... existence of financial markets as self-regulating and self-contained entities Even if Cerny’s work criticizes the emergence of self-regulating markets on a global scale, he bases his arguments on a profoundly uncritical image of the financial market as an efficient and transparent mechanism, allocating capital on the basis of price information It is only thus that Cerny’s political agenda can prioritize . Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance Volume 23 Himadeep Muppidi, The Politics of the Global Volume 22 William A. Callahan, Contingent States: Greater China and. Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goede, Marieke de, 1971– Virtue, fortune, and faith : a genealogy of nance / Marieke de Goede. p. cm. — (Borderlines ; 24) Includes bibliographical references and index. . the domain of finance as a legitimate, rational, and, above all, natural practice. These transformations concern the way in which the virtue of financial practice was articulated in contrast