Vidar Thorsteinsson will be presenting his paper Socializing the Dialectic of Risk: Notes on American Capitalism and the Making of Modern Finance at the final fall meeting of the Political Theory Workshop.
Abstract: From the early futures contracts of the Chicago wheat market, through the Roosevelt administration’s launching of the amortized mortgage plan, and finally to contemporary credit scoring, the paper explores the history of American financialization as a series of attempts to anticipate and ‘precommensurate’ the inherent riskiness of all capitalist exchange. The paper pays particular attention to how finance practices simultaneously overcome and augment risk, creating a dialectic which has driven the expansion of credit instruments and networks to ever broader segments of the population and to a greater investment in subjective life.
Discussant: Marcus Green (Otterbein University)
