Martijn Konings
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 160642 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Martijn Konings |
| NOMBRES | Martijn |
| APELLIDO | Konings |
| FIRMA | KONINGS M |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7924-4694 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 315 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
The Edges of the Asset Economy
Imagining the future in bailout capitalism
The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become dominated by a particular image: capital's Grinch-like theft of the future. But this image overlooks the peculiar temporal structure of neoliberalism, which renews its broken promises by making up ever more excuses for the past. Contemporary bailout society requires a form of critique that acknowledges these dynamics, that targets the way capital reconstructs our relationship …
Edges of the financial imagination
Neither external nor internal to finance, the financial imagination marks out a space where the theoretical and practical aspects of finance come together in the inner life of the subject. That means there is something about financial subjectivity that escapes a functional view on the imagination. The purpose of this forum is to probe the contours of the financial imagination in terms of its perimeters and blind spots, its fantasies and delusions
Asset-Based Futures
This article engages with the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as an event that is moving us towards a new era. Highlighting the paradox that this question has emerged in the context of the stoppages and shutdowns associated with the pandemic, we suggest that any assessment of social change and the futures such change might unfold must be situated on the terrain formatted by the temporal logics of capitalism. At our cur…
Dimensions of the asset economy
Re-thinking the Liquid Core of Capitalism with Hyman Minsky
While Minsky's work is often identified with the critique of financial speculation, this paper argues that there is a different side to his work. We argue that Minsky can be read as offering a post-foundational perspective on political economy that recognizes the speculative dimension of all economic activity. This post-foundational reading allows for an understanding of neoliberal policymaking in terms of the provision of liquidity to too-big-to…
Assessing successful school leadership
Improving the Quality and Performance of Institutional Review Boards in the U.S.A. Through Performance Measurements
Performance measurement leads to quality improvement, because performance measurement can identify areas of vulnerability to guide quality improvement activities. Recommendations from empirical institutional review board (IRB) performance measurement data on research approval criteria, expedited review protocols, exempt protocols, and IRB continuing review requirements published over the past 10 years are reviewed here to improve the quality and …
Recording as the Re-Membering Work of the People
The word leitourgia, meaning the work of the people, is often used to describe Christian worship and has also been adopted by many scholars of Jewish public worship. This word implies that liturgical worship in the Jewish and Christian traditions is a work that incorporates a people or assembly. The time- and place-shifting afforded by new recording technologies, however, alters the nature of liturgical work and its relationship to tradition, mem…
Art under Neoliberalism
Apart from the longstanding and much-debated problem of art's commodification, how does neoliberalism transform and determine the conditions of artistic practice? Further, if neoliberalism is a substantially distinct stage in the history of capitalism, and not merely its intensification, what are the implications of this new condition for the practice and criticism of contemporary art? What does it mean to practice and theorize art, to be an arti…
The asset economy
This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty’s contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from competing perspectives that tend to overemphasize the o…
Class in the 21st century
What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how reside…
The institutional logic of property inflation
The Legacy of Leo Panitch
The shock of Leo Panitch's untimely death in December of 2020 has worn off; our sense of profound loss has not.In the days that followed his passing, emails, editorials, obituaries, and forums appeared describing his immense intellectual, political, and personal influence.These tributes have captured something of his legacy, while also articulating the sadness experienced by so many of his friends and colleagues.Articles assessing his global infl…
Capital and Time
The Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism
How finance is governed
Although cultural economy scholarship has highlighted the inherently speculative character of economic action and argued that regulation is often imbricated with (rather than independent from) the speculative logics of economic life, it has stopped short of pursuing the implications for the problematics that have traditionally occupied political economists. To pursue such an analysis, this paper suggests a reframing of the theme of performativity…
Against exceptionalism
After the financial crisis of 2007–08, many commentators, adopting a broadly Polanyian logic of reasoning, expected a departure from neoliberalism. The failure of this shift to materialize has typically been accounted for in ‘exceptionalist’ terms: the persistence of neoliberalism is understood not as a function of a specific legitimacy it has itself engendered, but in terms of external interventions by elites who manage to ‘capture’ executive an…
Questioning the utopian springs of market economy
This volume brings together papers that were initially presented, or otherwise have their origins, in an international conference ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’, held at the Un
Books by Our Readers
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Capital and time
Critics of capitalist finance tend to focus on its speculative character. Our financial markets, they lament, encourage irresponsible bets on the future that reflect no real underlying value. Why is it, then, that opportunities for speculative investment continue to proliferate in the wake of major economic crises? To make sense of this, Capital and Time advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the…
The logic of leverage
This rejoinder takes up some of the points that have been raised by the reviews of Capital and Time in this forum. It engages the question of how political economy should position itself vis-à-vis concerns about the dangers of essentialism and teleological explanation. It argues that a proper theorization of the logic of 'leverage' is key to the development of a political economy that appropriates the insights of post-foundational theory but is s…
Beyond the Political Theory / Political Economy Divide
Neoliberalism
Governing the system
The 2007/2008 financial crisis was widely expected to usher in a shift toward a post-neoliberal regime that would be more actively concerned with system-level risk and impose restrictive regulations on financial institutions and markets. Such a shift, it is now widely recognized, has failed to materialize. Commentators have tended to point to the “capture” of policymaking processes by financial elites to account for the failure of reform. This ar…
Class in the 21st century
What becomes of class when residential property prices in major cities around the world accrue more income in a year than the average wage worker? This paper investigates the dynamic of combined wage disinflation and asset price inflation as a key to understanding the growth of inequality in recent decades. Taking the city of Sydney, Australia, as exemplary of a dynamic that has unfolded across the Anglo-American economies, it explains how reside…
Geographies of Financialization in Disarray
The securitization crisis that started in mid-2007 has demonstrated that we are indeed living in a "global financial village" and are all subject to the vagaries of financialization. Nevertheless, the fallout from the credit crisis has not been homogeneous across space. That some localities were hit harder than others suggests that there are distinct geographies of financialization. Combining insights from the "varieties of capitalism" literature…
The institutional foundations of US structural power in international finance
This essay argues that existing interpretations of US structural power in international finance do not pay sufficient attention to its institutional basis and specifities. It reviews some of the contributions to the literature and offers an account of the re-emergence of global finance during the 1960s to the monetarist turn and its aftermath. The conclusion offers some thoughts on the implications of the analysis for our understanding of US fina…
Contingency and Foundation
European finance in the American mirror
This article examines the implications of financialisation for the conceptual status of, and the relationship between, the continental European and Anglo-American financial systems. After a theoretical discussion of the issue of institutional variety and convergence, the essay outlines the trajectory of financialisation processes from their American origins to the UK and continental Europe. It emphasizes that in key respects Anglo-American capita…
The rise of activist investors and patterns of political responses
This paper ventures an institutional explanation for distinct patterns of political contestation over the rise of activist investors such as private equity and hedge funds in Europe and North America. Taking issue with the dichotomous nature of the literature on varieties of capitalism (VoC) and the homogenizing assumptions of the literature on financialization, we argue that the specific patterns of politicization in the US, Germany and the Neth…
Governing the system
The 2007/2008 financial crisis was widely expected to usher in a shift toward a post-neoliberal regime that would be more actively concerned with system-level risk and impose restrictive regulations on financial institutions and markets. Such a shift, it is now widely recognized, has failed to materialize. Commentators have tended to point to the “capture” of policymaking processes by financial elites to account for the failure of reform. This ar…
The asset economy
This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty’s contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from competing perspectives that tend to overemphasize the o…
Imagined Double Movements
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the American Tea Party movement has played a prominent role in forcing a return to neoliberalism. Progressive treatments of this development have been rather dismissive: seen through a lens that emphasizes the inherent tension between capitalism and democracy, neoliberal populism can only appear as an incongruous phenomenon. The article suggests that such assessments reflect an insufficiently developed un…
Neoliberalism and the American State
This essay argues that neoliberalism was a return to classical, laissez-faire liberalism only on an ideological level, and that neoliberal practices were never so much about subordinating public and private actors to disembedded markets as about enhancing the American state's infrastructural control over financial life and advancing the capacities of those actors who enjoy privileged access to its organizational mechanisms. The neoliberal era is …
The construction of US financial power
Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise US financial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyond state-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the state’s interaction with socio-economic forces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state and market, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural power a…
Re-thinking the Liquid Core of Capitalism with Hyman Minsky
While Minsky's work is often identified with the critique of financial speculation, this paper argues that there is a different side to his work. We argue that Minsky can be read as offering a post-foundational perspective on political economy that recognizes the speculative dimension of all economic activity. This post-foundational reading allows for an understanding of neoliberal policymaking in terms of the provision of liquidity to too-big-to…
Pragmatics of Money and Finance
Contemporary approaches to finance as diverse as performativity theory and Marxist value-form theory have a tendency to lapse into a dogmatic structuralism that merely replicates the orthodoxies of financial economics. These approaches are unable to account for the possibility of either systemic failure or historical rupture in the organization of financial markets. This introduction considers several possible ways of exiting this impasse and pre…
The Spirit of Austerity
Existing interpretations of the current resurgence of austerity discourses tend to attribute this to a failure to learn the lessons of the financial crisis. The picture of a return to neoliberal business-as-usual, however, sits uneasily with the popular discontent and democratic energies unleashed by the crisis. Indeed, in the USA it is precisely the mobilization of populist forces that has been a driving force behind the turn to austerity. The p…
The Pragmatic Sources of Modern Power
Much work in present-day political economy still adheres to an economistic understanding of how markets operate - evident above all in the tendency to concentrate on the disciplinary and constraining effects of globalization. Using American power in financial affairs as an example, this essay proposes a shift of focus towards the constitution of actor capacities, which will permit more accurate conceptualizations of highly leveraged forms of agen…
Asset-Based Futures
This article engages with the question of whether the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood as an event that is moving us towards a new era. Highlighting the paradox that this question has emerged in the context of the stoppages and shutdowns associated with the pandemic, we suggest that any assessment of social change and the futures such change might unfold must be situated on the terrain formatted by the temporal logics of capitalism. At our cur…
Dimensions of the asset economy
Capital and time
Critics of capitalist finance tend to focus on its speculative character. Our financial markets, they lament, encourage irresponsible bets on the future that reflect no real underlying value. Why is it, then, that opportunities for speculative investment continue to proliferate in the wake of major economic crises? To make sense of this, Capital and Time advances an understanding of economy as a process whereby patterns of order emerge out of the…
Financial affect
Critical theory has often remained unduly beholden to accounts of capitalist development that emphasize its homogenizing effects and the tendency of its financial logic to destroy the complexity and organic connectedness of human life. This paper suggests that we may move beyond the impasse of this style of critique by analyzing money, capitalism's quintessential sign, as an icon – a sign that represents a paradoxical coincidence of potentiality …
Renewing State Theory
The role of the state in recent years has demonstrated the continued need for the insights of Marxist state theory. Yet this should not blind us to the reasons why the latter became discredited. This article seeks to rescue the key insights of Marxist state theory from the clutches of its structuralist legacy. It discusses contributions that successfully avoided the conceptual problems of structuralism and proposes that we re-energise state theor…
Myths of Neoliberal Deregulation
Contrary to mainstream diagnoses blaming the current financial crisis on a retreat of the state, Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings trace the active interventions that have shaped US finance and yoked working-class America to the discipline of debt
US Financial Power in Crisis
This essay examines the questions raised by the present financial crisis through an enquiry into the institutional foundations of American finance. We view with some scepticism strong claims concerning the disastrous outcome for the structural dynamism of the global financial system and America's position in it. Many critical political economists tend to take the system of global financial markets as their point of departure and then locate the U…
The institutional logic of property inflation
Questioning the utopian springs of market economy
This volume brings together papers that were initially presented, or otherwise have their origins, in an international conference ‘Questioning the Utopian Springs of Market Economy’, held at the Un
Imagining the future in bailout capitalism
The interface of political economy with arts and literature has become dominated by a particular image: capital's Grinch-like theft of the future. But this image overlooks the peculiar temporal structure of neoliberalism, which renews its broken promises by making up ever more excuses for the past. Contemporary bailout society requires a form of critique that acknowledges these dynamics, that targets the way capital reconstructs our relationship …
The Globalization Decade
Over the past decade the Socialist Register has been widely recognised as providing the most distinctive investigations on the left today of the contradictions of globalisation, the internationalisation of the state, progressive competitiveness, the new imperialism and popular global mobilisations against it. Among the well known writers whose essays have built the Register's reputation for this are Robert Cox, Harry Magdoff, Andrew Glyn, Bob Sut…
The institutional foundations of US structural power in international finance
This essay argues that existing interpretations of US structural power in international finance do not pay sufficient attention to its institutional basis and specifities. It reviews some of the contributions to the literature and offers an account of the re-emergence of global finance during the 1960s to the monetarist turn and its aftermath. The conclusion offers some thoughts on the implications of the analysis for our understanding of US fina…
US Financial Power in Crisis
This essay examines the questions raised by the present financial crisis through an enquiry into the institutional foundations of American finance. We view with some scepticism strong claims concerning the disastrous outcome for the structural dynamism of the global financial system and America's position in it. Many critical political economists tend to take the system of global financial markets as their point of departure and then locate the U…
The rise of activist investors and patterns of political responses
This paper ventures an institutional explanation for distinct patterns of political contestation over the rise of activist investors such as private equity and hedge funds in Europe and North America. Taking issue with the dichotomous nature of the literature on varieties of capitalism (VoC) and the homogenizing assumptions of the literature on financialization, we argue that the specific patterns of politicization in the US, Germany and the Neth…
European finance in the American mirror
This article examines the implications of financialisation for the conceptual status of, and the relationship between, the continental European and Anglo-American financial systems. After a theoretical discussion of the issue of institutional variety and convergence, the essay outlines the trajectory of financialisation processes from their American origins to the UK and continental Europe. It emphasizes that in key respects Anglo-American capita…
The construction of US financial power
Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise US financial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyond state-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the state’s interaction with socio-economic forces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state and market, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural power a…
Myths of Neoliberal Deregulation
Contrary to mainstream diagnoses blaming the current financial crisis on a retreat of the state, Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings trace the active interventions that have shaped US finance and yoked working-class America to the discipline of debt
Renewing State Theory
The role of the state in recent years has demonstrated the continued need for the insights of Marxist state theory. Yet this should not blind us to the reasons why the latter became discredited. This article seeks to rescue the key insights of Marxist state theory from the clutches of its structuralist legacy. It discusses contributions that successfully avoided the conceptual problems of structuralism and proposes that we re-energise state theor…
Social Scientists and Economic Life at the Start of the Twenty-First Century
Geographies of Financialization in Disarray
The securitization crisis that started in mid-2007 has demonstrated that we are indeed living in a "global financial village" and are all subject to the vagaries of financialization. Nevertheless, the fallout from the credit crisis has not been homogeneous across space. That some localities were hit harder than others suggests that there are distinct geographies of financialization. Combining insights from the "varieties of capitalism" literature…
The Pragmatic Sources of Modern Power
Much work in present-day political economy still adheres to an economistic understanding of how markets operate - evident above all in the tendency to concentrate on the disciplinary and constraining effects of globalization. Using American power in financial affairs as an example, this essay proposes a shift of focus towards the constitution of actor capacities, which will permit more accurate conceptualizations of highly leveraged forms of agen…
Neoliberalism and the American State
This essay argues that neoliberalism was a return to classical, laissez-faire liberalism only on an ideological level, and that neoliberal practices were never so much about subordinating public and private actors to disembedded markets as about enhancing the American state's infrastructural control over financial life and advancing the capacities of those actors who enjoy privileged access to its organizational mechanisms. The neoliberal era is …
The Development of American Finance
Since the 1960s, scholars and other commentators have frequently announced the imminent decline of American financial power: excessive speculation and debt are believed to have undermined the long-term basis of a stable US-led financial order. But the American financial system has repeatedly shown itself to be more resilient than such assessments suggest. This book argues that there is considerable coherence to American finance: far from being a …
Money as Icon
This essay develops a particular perspective on the nature of the modern financial imaginary. Recent debates of money have emphasized its dual (both universal and particular) character but have been unable to convincingly articulate the nature of this duality. The argument put forward here suggests that we should take the intractability of the question “what is money?” as an important clue to the paradoxical nature of our financial experience. Th…
The social selves of neoliberal capitalism
Imagined Double Movements
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the American Tea Party movement has played a prominent role in forcing a return to neoliberalism. Progressive treatments of this development have been rather dismissive: seen through a lens that emphasizes the inherent tension between capitalism and democracy, neoliberal populism can only appear as an incongruous phenomenon. The article suggests that such assessments reflect an insufficiently developed un…
Les mythes de la déréglementation néolibérale
Cet article se penche sur le consensus selon lequel la crise financière globale résulterait essentiellement, voir uniquement, d’une entreprise de dérégulation financière. Selon ces interprétations, le rôle traditionnellement joué par l’État dans la régulation de la finance se serait effrité en parallèle à la montée en puissance des institutions financières. Le corolaire de ces analyses est que le retour à une plus grande régulation serait l’avenu…
Financial affect
Critical theory has often remained unduly beholden to accounts of capitalist development that emphasize its homogenizing effects and the tendency of its financial logic to destroy the complexity and organic connectedness of human life. This paper suggests that we may move beyond the impasse of this style of critique by analyzing money, capitalism's quintessential sign, as an icon – a sign that represents a paradoxical coincidence of potentiality …
Hoodwinked by Hayek
In an interview with the New York Times evolutionary theorist Daniel Dennett reflected on the notoriously uncompromising character of his critique of religion: ‘There's simply no polite way to tell
The Emotional Logic of Capitalism
While many critiques of money and the market focus on its rationalizing and utilitarian logic, this book argues that the operation of capitalist economy centrally involves the production of new sources of faith and enchantment
Nicholas R. Parrillo. Against the Profit Motive
The aim of Nicholas R. Parrillo's book is to describe the historical shift in the mode of remuneration of government personnel, from one based on “facilitative payments” and “bounties” (p. 2) to the salary-based regime that became the norm in twentieth-century America. In the former model, officeholders charged for the services they provided (e.g., approving licenses) or were rewarded on the basis of their productivity in a specific field of gove…
The paradox of economism
For some decades now, progressively minded social scientists have argued that markets are too important to leave to economists - indeed, entire new subfields have formed in response to this concern. But this engagement with economic life has often been somewhat half-hearted. Particularly telling in this respect is the fact that these new fields have organized themselves centrally around the rejection of 'economism' - the idea that markets have se…
State of Speculation
Heterodox critiques of contemporary capitalism tend to depict speculation as the irrational investment in insubstantial signs. This essay suggests that the secularized subject speculates not in defiance of fundamental values but precisely because it has none to fall back on. It develops the point through an analysis that foregrounds the pragmatically constitutive logic of speculative fictions and expectations and the plastic logic of value. The a…
Contingency and Foundation
Governing the system
The 2007/2008 financial crisis was widely expected to usher in a shift toward a post-neoliberal regime that would be more actively concerned with system-level risk and impose restrictive regulations on financial institutions and markets. Such a shift, it is now widely recognized, has failed to materialize. Commentators have tended to point to the “capture” of policymaking processes by financial elites to account for the failure of reform. This ar…
Political science (28 obras) · Economics (27 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (24 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Law (18 obras) · Political Economy and Marxism (18 obras) · Economic Theory and Policy (17 obras) · Political economy (14 obras) · Capitalism (12 obras)