‘A sense of the systemic’: the Bank of England and the language of inclusive capitalism

Abstract

Successive crises – social, environmental and political – have led some in global governance circles to advocate a more ‘inclusive capitalism’. In this article, I show how this postcrisis language of inclusive capitalism was used by a specific subset of officials within the Bank of England: Those with high levels of experience in public sector and international official institutions. It is argued that these officials are ‘organic intellectuals’ who mobilise their experience of inter-institutional collaboration as a deliberative model for solving long-term social problems. The institutional experience of these officials and their concern with crises of trust in expertise facilitated the adoption of these models of communicative intervention. I draw on a novel dataset of Bank officials’ career data and speeches, as well as twelve interviews with current and former Bank staff, to show who used this language, in what settings and what motivated its adoption. The article makes a novel contribution to debates about the motivations of key figures in central banks, suggesting that their actions go beyond reputation defence to encompass an expansive worldview of how capitalism might solve its myriad crises.