THE ENDLESS ACCUMULATION OF HISTORY IN FINANCIAL TIMES

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, which unfolds a philosophy of history for contemporary “financial times.” I turn first to Samman's concept of the strange loops of financial history, and so to the historical turn initiated by the subprime crisis of 2008. Then, I add the concept of strange portraiture to Samman's idea of strange history. Borrowing a metaphor from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, I trace the oscillating appearance of the linked faces of homo historia and homo economicus, which each offer distinct explanatory frameworks “under the sign of finance.” In this way, I suggest that we can also observe how capitalism transformed the meaning and possible trajectories of something like fate from invented origins to imagined destinies. In that frame, I explore how the loops that Samman underscores are also bound to the ways in which history and economics have competed and continue to compete for ascendency as modern sense‐making epistemes with different time‐binding effects.