Financial Governance

Modernity has given rise not merely to the sovereign states, to international trade companies, to influential financiers, to decentralized markets. It has also witnessed the formation of a particular type of power – finance – that cannot be properly described in terms either of political structures or of economic strategies. This type of power is constituted, instead, by the interpenetration of these poles. From the integration of private creditors into the government of early modern states, to the creation of central banks and public credit, all the way up to today’s capitalism of financial markets, we can trace the emergence of a special type of ‘economic governance’ that ultimately has immunized itself against the democratization of political power.

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Presented by the Graduate Students of the German Department of NYU