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Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason

by Martijn Konings on December 5, 2017

Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason

Martijn Konings | December 5, 2017

Tags: finance
finance
| 0 553

Critics of capitalist finance tend to focus on its speculative character. Our financial markets, they lament, encourage irresponsible bets on the future that reflect no real underlying value. Why is it, then, that opportunities for speculative investment continue to proliferate in the wake of major economic crises? To make sense of this my latest single-authored book Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the interaction of speculative investments.

Progressive critics have assumed that the state occupies a neutral, external position from which it can step in to constrain speculative behaviors. On the contrary, my argument is that the state has always been deeply implicated in the speculative dynamics of economic life. Through these insights, my book offers a new interpretation of both the economic problems that emerged during the 1970s and the way that neoliberalism responded to them. Neoliberalism’s strength derives from its intuition that there is no position that transcends the secular logic of risk, and from its insistence that individuals actively engage that logic. Not only is the critique of speculation misleading as a general approach; it is also incapable of recognising how American capitalism has come to embrace speculation and has thus been able to generate new kinds of order and governance.

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Author: Martijn Konings

Martijn Konings works in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Development of American Finance (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (Stanford University Press, 2015), Neoliberalism (with Damien Cahill, Polity, 2017) and Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018). With Melinda Cooper, he edits the new Stanford University Press series Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times.

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  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Other Reading Groups
    • The Rubicon Reading Group
    • Marxism Reading Group
    • Journal Club
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)