Virtue, Fortune, And Faith: A Geneaology Of Finance

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U of Minnesota Press, 2001 - 235 páginas
Less than two centuries ago finance - today viewed as the center of economic necessity and epitome of scientific respectability - stood condemned as disreputable fraud. How this change in status came about, and what it reveals about the nature of finance, is the story told in Virtue, Fortune, and Faith. A unique cultural history of modern financial markets from the early eighteenth century to the present day, the book offers a genealogical reading of the historical insecurities, debates, and controversies that had to be purged from nascent credit practices in order to produce the image of today's coherent and - largely - rational global financial sphere. Marieke de Goede discusses moral, religious, and political transformations that have slowly naturalized the domain of finance. Using a deft integration of feminist and poststructuralist approaches, her book demonstrates that finance - not just its rules of personal engagement, but also its statistics, formulas, instruments, and institutions - is a profoundly cultural and politically contingent practice. When closely examined, the history of finance is one of colonial conquest, sexual imagination, constructions of time, and discourses of legitimate (or illegitimate) profit making. Regardless, this history has had a far-reaching impact on the development of the modern international financial institutions that act as the stewards of the world's economic resources. De Goede explores the political contestations over ideas of time and money; the gendered discourse of credit and credibility; differences among gambling, finance, and speculation; debates over the proper definition of the free market; the meaning of financial crisis; and the morality of speculation. In an era when financial practices are pronounced too specialized for broad-based public, democratic debate, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith questions assumptions about international finance's unchallenged position and effectively exposes its ambiguous scientific authority.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

1 A Genealogy of Finance
1
2 Mastering Lady Credit
21
3 Finance Gambling and Speculation
47
4 The Dow Jones Average and the Birth of the Financial Market
87
5 Regulation and Risk in Contemporary Markets
121
6 Repoliticizing Financial Practices
145
Objectivity and Irony in the DotCom Bubble
177
Notes
185
Bibliography
197
Index
229
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Página 144 - These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary.
Página 25 - I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.
Página 7 - And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of power, not its points of application.
Página 70 - People will endeavor to forecast the future and to make agreements according to their prophecy. Speculation of this kind by competent men is the self-adjustment of society to the probable. Its value is well known as a means of avoiding or mitigating catastrophes, equalizing prices and providing for periods of want.
Página 110 - The farmer — he who raised the wheat — •was ruined upon one hand; the working man — he who consumed it — •was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, •who never saw the wheat they traded in, bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practiced their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty "deals," were reconciled in their differences, and went on through their appointed way, jovial, contented, enthroned, and unassailable.
Página 123 - We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals." In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.
Página 64 - The generally accepted doctrine in this country is, as stated' by Mr. Benjamin, that a contract for the sale of goods to be delivered at a future day is valid, even though the seller has not the goods, nor any other means of getting them than to go into the market and buy them...
Página 98 - ... of sugar, have sought to establish, and have established, artificial and unwarranted prices, not governed by the law of supply and demand, but based wholly on speculative dealings not involving the delivery of the quantities of sugar represented thereby, but altogether carried on for the purpose and with the effect of unduly enhancing the price of sugar, to the enrichment of said defendants and their principals, and to the detriment of the public.
Página 21 - Man, to all places of his resort, within and without the place of his ordinary residence; and the same passeth from Man to Man, within the Commonwealth; and goes round about, Nourishing (as it passeth) every part thereof; in so much as this Concoction is, as it were the Sanguification of the Commonwealth: For naturall Bloud is in like Manner made of the fruits of the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man.

Acerca del autor (2001)

Marieke de Goede is a lecturer in political history and international relations at the University of Amsterdam.

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