Edges of the financial imagination

Abstract

Social theory and political economy have been in dialogue for long enough now that it is no longer eccentric to speak of a ‘financial imagination’: the subject's encounter with the world of money and debt is traversed by hopes and dreams. Since this has become a commonplace, two perspectives on the financial imagination have come to dominate the scholarly field.One relates it primarily to the concepts and rhetoric of economic thought, found in various traditions of political economy, economics, and finance theory. This version of the financial imagination works from the outside-in, structuring the mechanisms and movements of the financial world from the perspective of some point outside of finance. The theoretical imagination of finance has been amply explored from a range of perspectives. There are histories of financial economists, conceptual histories of finance, genealogies of financial institutions, and so on (Mehrling, 2005; Toporowski, 2005; de Goede, 2005).