Moral and pragmatist sociology has studied capitalism as a set of institutions that require justification, which has historically been offered through forms of rewarding and meaningful work, anchoring the human life course in a narrative of individual and collective progress. However, emerging with neoliberalism, then becoming explicit after 2008, contemporary capitalism has become organised around the logic of assets and wealth as opposed to labour and production. This provokes a vacuum of justification. Once all actors are (as Minsky argued) balance sheet actors and profit becomes a function of sheer temporality, the economy ceases to function as a moral order and instead becomes imbued with existential concerns of temporality, durability, survival, and finitude. Possessed only of certain contingently acquired assets and liabilities, the self becomes wholly contingent in the sense described by Heidegger; that is, as ‘thrown’ into having had a past and into a relationship of ‘care’ towards the future. The article identifies symptoms of this existential condition in empirical studies of wealth elites, for whom (in the absence of conventional liberal and production-based measures of worth) problems of meaning, purpose, and finitude are endemic.

In this article, I offer a historical analysis of how bankers in Luxembourg came to be important service providers to borrowers in the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa. I demonstrate how a series of unique political and cultural factors linking Luxembourg and these two (neo)colonial regimes account for the financial activities that developed between the three jurisdictions. As such, I show that officials in the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa were able to count on their Luxembourg-based bankers for a variety of finance-related services, including the provision of Eurocurrency loans and the formation of offshore companies. In doing so, the article contributes to a body of literature in the social sciences of finance that has grown significantly in recent years: on the imperial and neocolonial basis of the contemporary global financial system.

This article investigates the promise of Insurtech to expand the frontier of the insurance market to include vulnerable populations around the world. It contributes to current debates on the proliferation of new technologies for financial inclusion as embedded in contemporary forms of platform-based capitalism. We argue that Insurtech’s promises fall short of expectations because of the contradiction between the principles of platform scalability and insurance risk pooling. Such contradictions lead Insurtech platforms to unpool risk rather than provide innovative technologies to pool it. This ultimately limits the expansion of markets for inclusive insurance as Insurtech platforms struggle to scale up the market through their supposedly disruptive technology. Our analysis draws on a range of regulatory reports, complemented by in-depth interviews with Insurtech executive officers. The article offers insights into the contradictory principles currently driving the digital inclusive insurance market, as well as the limits to the ongoing global expansion of platform capitalism.

Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression, the Economic Space Agency’s latest experiment in radical economic design, explores the possibility of designing a digitally native economy that is geared towards care, the arts, and the environment, and which not only refuses to give up on the financial frontiers of contemporary capitalism, but actively seeks to marshal them towards innovative ends. The architecture of a novel economic space comes into view through a set of protocols, which integrate economic information within a social value framework. This ‘Economic Space Protocol’ involves crafting a new grammar for economic information production processes that have traditionally been tied to competitive market behavior. This essay interrogates the place of finance in the book, emphasizing price discovery’s generativity with regards to information. What is necessary in the imagination of any postcapitalist future are radical design initiatives that contend with both the necessity and the limits of the price discovery process.

Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit). An insightful review by William Morgan (2024) probes some key dimensions of our project. This reply both reframes some of William’s insights and takes issue with others, especially those which emphasise a Hayekian interpretation.

This article reviews Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (2024) and Liliana Doganova’s Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology (2024), situating them within recent scholarship on a future-oriented, speculative, and economic subject. It focuses on the relationship between financial speculation and temporalities in the twentieth century, specifically on futures and the politics of value in American literature and the calculating technology of discounting. These books bridge what have been two distinct scholarly approaches to studies of capitalist futures: a theoretical focus on futures as cultural imaginaries or narratives of economic action and a material emphasis on practices for anticipating futures and managing risk. The article concludes with a discussion of power and profit in speculation and discounting, emphasizing inequitable access to speculative futures, and suggests that the multidirectional, nonlinear, recursive mode of financialized temporalities in these books might offer a guide to imagining and creating more just futures for us all.

What has actually happened to the political economy of the United States over the last half-century? For too long now, ‘neoliberalism’ has been the standard answer given, yet today, the term seems to have lost both its analytic and critical capacities. Melinda Cooper’s Counterrevolution offers readers a fresh and productive response to this fundamental question of contemporary political economy. Cooper comes neither to praise nor bury neoliberalism but to shift from the level of generalizing accounts or polemics to the level of concrete ideas and the policies they have engendered. She directs attention away from the Chicago school and toward both the Virginia School of public choice theory and a long line of supply-side thinkers. On strictly economic grounds, these two strands ought to be in tension, but Cooper illuminates their political convergence: agreeing to constrain ‘certain kinds of public spending’, they implemented a politics committed to inflating asset values for the wealthy while holding workers’ wage growth in check. This balance-sheet insurrection, which directs the flow of capitalist value upward, stopped and reversed the potential Keynesian revolution that had been underway in the 1950s and 1960s.