RESOCIALIZING FINANCE? OR DRESSING IT IN MUFTI?

Critical accounts of the financialization of the world economy decry the depersonalization and abstraction effected by finance in the service of extraction, expropriation and dispossession. Analysts and activists alike seek to re-socialize finance so that those whose interests it serves can be identified and so that new, socially embedded forms of exchange can emerge. They also seek to re-ground finance in a ‘real’, presumably material and social, fabric so that its excesses can be tamed and the sources of value made apparent. My essay questions these paired critiques and their supposed aims. It will argue that the continual attempt to reassert the social in economy points to a limit to the critical imagination, and that the critique of calculative rationality misses some of the other functions and practical effects of numbers besides commensuration and abstraction.

Keywords

• finance,
• money,
• quantification,
• abstraction,
• qualitative reasoning,
• Islamic banking,
• offshore