Fiscal State-Citizen Alignment: Tracing the Sociohistorical Conditions of the Financial Crisis

Abstract

AbstractThe 2008 crisis ended the growth bubble of the 2000s, which Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) governments facilitated through the normative/political-regulatory promotion of household indebtedness. Historically contextualizing this state-citizen relationship, this article maps out four episodes of sovereign fiscalism, namely, debt-taking in the Italian city-states, the making of the absolutist tax/fiscal state, the eighteenth/nineteenth century elaboration of the economic citizen, and the postwar era of managed capitalism. Finally, it applies this framework to the 2008 crisis and the larger post-1970s politico-economic constellation. The crisis can be perceived as a particular articulation of an age-old state-household dynamic—a dialectical alignment of the mode of fiscal state-crafting with the ethos of the state-citizen nexus—characterized by a heightened fiscal attentiveness to ordinary consumer-citizens. By uncovering the sociohistorical conditions governing the dom...