Description :
In this provocative look at one of the most important events of our time, renowned scholar Arjun Appadurai argues that the economic collapse of 2008—while indeed spurred on by greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking—was, ultimately, a failure of language. To prove this sophisticated point, he takes us into the world of derivative finance, which has become the core of contemporary trading and the primary target of blame for the collapse and all our subsequent woes. With incisive argumentation, he analyzes this challengingly technical world, drawing on thinkers such as J. L. Austin, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber as theoretical guides to showcase the ways language—and particular failures in it—paved the way for ruin.
Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University and a senior fellow of the Institute for Public Knowledge. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the author of editor of numerous books, including The Social Life of Things, Modernity at Large, Fear of Small Numbers, and The Future as Cultural Fact.
Content :
Preface
Chapter 1:The Logic of Promissory Finance
Chapter 2:The Entrepreneurial Ethic and the Spirit of Financialism
Chapter 3:The Ghost in the Financial Machine
Chapter 4:The Sacred Market
Chapter 5:Sociality, Uncertainty, and Ritual
Chapter 6:The Charismatic Derivative
Chapter 7:The Wealth of Dividuals
Chapter 8:The Global Ambitions of Finance
Chapter 9:The End of the Contractual Promise
Notes
References
Index No other Books by the same author | |