Samuel Knafo
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 250784 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Samuel Knafo |
| PRENOMES | Samuel |
| SOBRENOME | Knafo |
| ASSINATURA | KNAFO S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9374-8170 |
| VERIFICADO | Não |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 24 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 157 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 24 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Polanyi’s double movement and the politics of capitalism
Polanyi’s idea of the double movement has been highly influential to think the politics of capitalism. However, I argue that this notion relies on a problematic concept of the Market inherited from economics, which depoliticizes social reality. While Polanyi believed that it was possible to retain this notion to make sense of the political project of liberals, he underestimated how it hindered his attempt to make sense of the politics he studied.…
Neoliberal failures and the managerial takeover of governance
The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost.…
Rethinking neoliberalism after the Polanyian turn
The last two decades have seen an explosion of writings about neoliberalism insisting on the role of the state as a key architect of market dynamics. Drawing substantially from the work of Karl Polanyi, this literature has emphasised in various ways the socially constructed nature of neoliberalism. But as I argue, conceptual flaws in Polanyi’s conception of 19th liberal governance have helped perpetuate an ongoing reliance on the notion of the Ma…
The Antinomies of Political Marxism
This is a response to the contributions to the symposium on our initial article, ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’
The Power of Finance in the Age of Market Based Banking
It has long been assumed that marketisation would undermine banks, a claim reflected in the common opposition of market and bank-based finance. But as recent research shows, some banks have flourished in the marketized environment of financialisation. I argue the reason they have come to dominate financialisation stems from a revolution in funding that began in the 1960s with the rise of liability management. This practice enabled some banks to d…
Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism
Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the pr…
Introduction
As a set of ideas and practices, managerialism has arguably become a powerful behavioural logic shaping a range of processes and outcomes of governance in the world economy. Yet IPE has yet to directly interrogate managerialism as a distinct object of analysis. In this special issue, we bring together a range of authors to explore how managerialism reveals a set of complex histories, agents, and implications that are not self-evident and carry di…
Macro-finance and the financialisation of economic policy
Reflecting on the broad ambitions of macro-finance, I argue that the commitment to placing finance at the centre of our economic conceptions comes with significant risks that speak directly to the politics of financialisation. By redirecting the focus of economic governance towards finance, macro-finance may consolidate rather than challenge the problematic trends of global finance. More specifically, I argue that the focus of the money view on l…
Neoliberalism and the origins of public management
There is a rich literature on the emergence of new public management in the 1980s yet surprisingly little about the historical and social lineages of this movement. The scholarship on public management generally suggests that it was born out of the neoliberal critique of the state. The public sector would have thus borrowed corporate practices concerned with performance in order to instil market-like competition and make efficiency gains. This ar…
The myth of the shareholder revolution and the financialization of the firm
This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant conception of the financialization of the firm. This transformation is widely interpreted as a re-alignment of corporate management in response to growing shareholder power and neoliberal managerial norms associated notably with agency theory. By contrast, we demonstrate how the financialization of the firm has its roots in the innovations made in 196…
The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism
Managerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been written by scholars of neoliberalism about the actual relationship between managerialism and neoliberalism. Usually subsumed under a functional reading of neoliberalism, managerialism has too often been understood simply as a means for neoliberal ends (i.e. to promote market rule or competition). This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds …
A Methodological Turn Long Overdue
This chapter argues that the future of the discipline, or at least of its critical approaches, should be cast in the font of a methodological turn. Building on recent literature, which seeks to highlight the importance of methodology, it states that it is time for critical scholars to move beyond their long infatuation with ontology in order to reflect concretely on the demands that perspectivism places on critical scholarship. For the challenge …
Bourdieu and the dead end of reflexivity
This article examines recent attempts by International Relations (IR) scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our s…
Patient capital in the age of financialized managerialism
This article focuses on the history of financialized management and its connections to shareholder value, which is often viewed as undermining patient strategies of investments. We argue that the rise of financialized management has in fact a long history that goes back to the conglomerate movement in 1960s America. As we show, the conglomerates pioneered the use of financial markets as a baseline for strategy, and the emphasis on financial trans…
The Making of Modern Finance
The Making of Modern Finance is a path-breaking study of the construction of liberal financial governance and demonstrates how complex forms of control by the state profoundly transformed the nature of modern finance. Challenging dominant theoretical conceptions of liberal financial governance in international political economy, this book argues that liberal economic governance is too often perceived as a passive form of governance. It situates t…
Making of Modern Finance
Financial Crises and the Political Economy of Speculative Bubbles
Finance has traditionally been conceptualized on the basis of what could be labelled a credit model. This model theorizes finance as a functional actor in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural model has entertained a specific understanding of the contradictions of finance which emphasizes the imbalances in its relation to production. While the rich literature based on this template has generated important insights for understand…
The Politics of Liberal Financial Governance and the Gold Standard
This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles ov…
Critical approaches and the legacy of the agent/structure debate in international relations
This article examines the significance of the concept of agency for the project of critical theory as defined by Robert Cox. Even if numerous scholars recognize the importance of agency, very few have managed to set up an agenda that uses this notion in productive ways. I argue that this failure largely stems from the desire to present power as a structural phenomenon. If we see power as embedded in the very structure of society, it becomes diffi…
The state and the rise of speculative finance in England
This article discusses the origins of the speculative configuration that has come to characterize English banking. It criticizes Gerschenkron's view that early nineteenth-century English banking developed relatively autonomously from manufacturing. Pointing out that he misunderstood the specific nature of English finance and the reasons that explained the later shift towards speculation, it shows how Gerschenkron and his followers have consistent…
Political Marxism and Value Theory
This article proposes a reading of value theory firmly entrenched in the historicist framework of political Marxism; one which gives precedence to social relations and historical development over abstract logic and formal models. It argues that Marx's theory of value can be read as elucidating how social norms are being unwittingly created under capitalism by contrast with precapitalist societies. The article is divided into two sections. The fir…
Capital Resurgent
The gold standard and the origins of the modern international monetary system
This article explores the ways in which the classical gold standard established the foundations for a modern international monetary system with its distinctive forms of crisis and regulatory frameworks. The specific nature of this transformation is often overlooked because of a tendency in the literature to compare the gold standard in relation to subsequent monetary systems, such as Bretton Woods. To remedy this historical bias, the classical go…
The fetishizing subject in Marx's Capital
It is fair to say that the duality of worker as "object of capital" and as "living creative subject" has never been adequately resolved in Marxist Theory.' (Harvey, 1982: 114
The myth of the shareholder revolution and the financialization of the firm
This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant conception of the financialization of the firm. This transformation is widely interpreted as a re-alignment of corporate management in response to growing shareholder power and neoliberal managerial norms associated notably with agency theory. By contrast, we demonstrate how the financialization of the firm has its roots in the innovations made in 196…
The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism
Managerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been written by scholars of neoliberalism about the actual relationship between managerialism and neoliberalism. Usually subsumed under a functional reading of neoliberalism, managerialism has too often been understood simply as a means for neoliberal ends (i.e. to promote market rule or competition). This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds …
Critical approaches and the legacy of the agent/structure debate in international relations
This article examines the significance of the concept of agency for the project of critical theory as defined by Robert Cox. Even if numerous scholars recognize the importance of agency, very few have managed to set up an agenda that uses this notion in productive ways. I argue that this failure largely stems from the desire to present power as a structural phenomenon. If we see power as embedded in the very structure of society, it becomes diffi…
Neoliberalism and the origins of public management
There is a rich literature on the emergence of new public management in the 1980s yet surprisingly little about the historical and social lineages of this movement. The scholarship on public management generally suggests that it was born out of the neoliberal critique of the state. The public sector would have thus borrowed corporate practices concerned with performance in order to instil market-like competition and make efficiency gains. This ar…
Introduction
As a set of ideas and practices, managerialism has arguably become a powerful behavioural logic shaping a range of processes and outcomes of governance in the world economy. Yet IPE has yet to directly interrogate managerialism as a distinct object of analysis. In this special issue, we bring together a range of authors to explore how managerialism reveals a set of complex histories, agents, and implications that are not self-evident and carry di…
Bourdieu and the dead end of reflexivity
This article examines recent attempts by International Relations (IR) scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our s…
Political Marxism and Value Theory
This article proposes a reading of value theory firmly entrenched in the historicist framework of political Marxism; one which gives precedence to social relations and historical development over abstract logic and formal models. It argues that Marx's theory of value can be read as elucidating how social norms are being unwittingly created under capitalism by contrast with precapitalist societies. The article is divided into two sections. The fir…
The gold standard and the origins of the modern international monetary system
This article explores the ways in which the classical gold standard established the foundations for a modern international monetary system with its distinctive forms of crisis and regulatory frameworks. The specific nature of this transformation is often overlooked because of a tendency in the literature to compare the gold standard in relation to subsequent monetary systems, such as Bretton Woods. To remedy this historical bias, the classical go…
Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism
Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the pr…
Patient capital in the age of financialized managerialism
This article focuses on the history of financialized management and its connections to shareholder value, which is often viewed as undermining patient strategies of investments. We argue that the rise of financialized management has in fact a long history that goes back to the conglomerate movement in 1960s America. As we show, the conglomerates pioneered the use of financial markets as a baseline for strategy, and the emphasis on financial trans…
Financial Crises and the Political Economy of Speculative Bubbles
Finance has traditionally been conceptualized on the basis of what could be labelled a credit model. This model theorizes finance as a functional actor in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural model has entertained a specific understanding of the contradictions of finance which emphasizes the imbalances in its relation to production. While the rich literature based on this template has generated important insights for understand…
The state and the rise of speculative finance in England
This article discusses the origins of the speculative configuration that has come to characterize English banking. It criticizes Gerschenkron's view that early nineteenth-century English banking developed relatively autonomously from manufacturing. Pointing out that he misunderstood the specific nature of English finance and the reasons that explained the later shift towards speculation, it shows how Gerschenkron and his followers have consistent…
Macro-finance and the financialisation of economic policy
Reflecting on the broad ambitions of macro-finance, I argue that the commitment to placing finance at the centre of our economic conceptions comes with significant risks that speak directly to the politics of financialisation. By redirecting the focus of economic governance towards finance, macro-finance may consolidate rather than challenge the problematic trends of global finance. More specifically, I argue that the focus of the money view on l…
The Power of Finance in the Age of Market Based Banking
It has long been assumed that marketisation would undermine banks, a claim reflected in the common opposition of market and bank-based finance. But as recent research shows, some banks have flourished in the marketized environment of financialisation. I argue the reason they have come to dominate financialisation stems from a revolution in funding that began in the 1960s with the rise of liability management. This practice enabled some banks to d…
The Politics of Liberal Financial Governance and the Gold Standard
This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles ov…
The fetishizing subject in Marx's Capital
It is fair to say that the duality of worker as "object of capital" and as "living creative subject" has never been adequately resolved in Marxist Theory.' (Harvey, 1982: 114
Neoliberal failures and the managerial takeover of governance
The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost.…
Rethinking neoliberalism after the Polanyian turn
The last two decades have seen an explosion of writings about neoliberalism insisting on the role of the state as a key architect of market dynamics. Drawing substantially from the work of Karl Polanyi, this literature has emphasised in various ways the socially constructed nature of neoliberalism. But as I argue, conceptual flaws in Polanyi’s conception of 19th liberal governance have helped perpetuate an ongoing reliance on the notion of the Ma…
The Antinomies of Political Marxism
This is a response to the contributions to the symposium on our initial article, ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’
Capital Resurgent
The fetishizing subject in Marx's Capital
It is fair to say that the duality of worker as "object of capital" and as "living creative subject" has never been adequately resolved in Marxist Theory.' (Harvey, 1982: 114
The gold standard and the origins of the modern international monetary system
This article explores the ways in which the classical gold standard established the foundations for a modern international monetary system with its distinctive forms of crisis and regulatory frameworks. The specific nature of this transformation is often overlooked because of a tendency in the literature to compare the gold standard in relation to subsequent monetary systems, such as Bretton Woods. To remedy this historical bias, the classical go…
Political Marxism and Value Theory
This article proposes a reading of value theory firmly entrenched in the historicist framework of political Marxism; one which gives precedence to social relations and historical development over abstract logic and formal models. It argues that Marx's theory of value can be read as elucidating how social norms are being unwittingly created under capitalism by contrast with precapitalist societies. The article is divided into two sections. The fir…
Capital Resurgent
The state and the rise of speculative finance in England
This article discusses the origins of the speculative configuration that has come to characterize English banking. It criticizes Gerschenkron's view that early nineteenth-century English banking developed relatively autonomously from manufacturing. Pointing out that he misunderstood the specific nature of English finance and the reasons that explained the later shift towards speculation, it shows how Gerschenkron and his followers have consistent…
Critical approaches and the legacy of the agent/structure debate in international relations
This article examines the significance of the concept of agency for the project of critical theory as defined by Robert Cox. Even if numerous scholars recognize the importance of agency, very few have managed to set up an agenda that uses this notion in productive ways. I argue that this failure largely stems from the desire to present power as a structural phenomenon. If we see power as embedded in the very structure of society, it becomes diffi…
The Politics of Liberal Financial Governance and the Gold Standard
This article challenges the way liberal economic governance has come to be theorised as a passive and depoliticised form of governance. Using the classic case of the gold standard, it shows how state intervention came to be shaped by considerations of state power and diverged considerably from the traditional emphasis on free markets and stable conditions of investments. As I argue, the gold standard was constructed through political struggles ov…
The Making of Modern Finance
The Making of Modern Finance is a path-breaking study of the construction of liberal financial governance and demonstrates how complex forms of control by the state profoundly transformed the nature of modern finance. Challenging dominant theoretical conceptions of liberal financial governance in international political economy, this book argues that liberal economic governance is too often perceived as a passive form of governance. It situates t…
Making of Modern Finance
Financial Crises and the Political Economy of Speculative Bubbles
Finance has traditionally been conceptualized on the basis of what could be labelled a credit model. This model theorizes finance as a functional actor in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural model has entertained a specific understanding of the contradictions of finance which emphasizes the imbalances in its relation to production. While the rich literature based on this template has generated important insights for understand…
Bourdieu and the dead end of reflexivity
This article examines recent attempts by International Relations (IR) scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our s…
Patient capital in the age of financialized managerialism
This article focuses on the history of financialized management and its connections to shareholder value, which is often viewed as undermining patient strategies of investments. We argue that the rise of financialized management has in fact a long history that goes back to the conglomerate movement in 1960s America. As we show, the conglomerates pioneered the use of financial markets as a baseline for strategy, and the emphasis on financial trans…
A Methodological Turn Long Overdue
This chapter argues that the future of the discipline, or at least of its critical approaches, should be cast in the font of a methodological turn. Building on recent literature, which seeks to highlight the importance of methodology, it states that it is time for critical scholars to move beyond their long infatuation with ontology in order to reflect concretely on the demands that perspectivism places on critical scholarship. For the challenge …
The Managerial Lineages of Neoliberalism
Managerialism is often depicted as a key practice of neoliberalism yet relatively little has been written by scholars of neoliberalism about the actual relationship between managerialism and neoliberalism. Usually subsumed under a functional reading of neoliberalism, managerialism has too often been understood simply as a means for neoliberal ends (i.e. to promote market rule or competition). This paper challenges this perspective on the grounds …
Neoliberalism and the origins of public management
There is a rich literature on the emergence of new public management in the 1980s yet surprisingly little about the historical and social lineages of this movement. The scholarship on public management generally suggests that it was born out of the neoliberal critique of the state. The public sector would have thus borrowed corporate practices concerned with performance in order to instil market-like competition and make efficiency gains. This ar…
The myth of the shareholder revolution and the financialization of the firm
This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant conception of the financialization of the firm. This transformation is widely interpreted as a re-alignment of corporate management in response to growing shareholder power and neoliberal managerial norms associated notably with agency theory. By contrast, we demonstrate how the financialization of the firm has its roots in the innovations made in 196…
Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism
Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the pr…
Introduction
As a set of ideas and practices, managerialism has arguably become a powerful behavioural logic shaping a range of processes and outcomes of governance in the world economy. Yet IPE has yet to directly interrogate managerialism as a distinct object of analysis. In this special issue, we bring together a range of authors to explore how managerialism reveals a set of complex histories, agents, and implications that are not self-evident and carry di…
Macro-finance and the financialisation of economic policy
Reflecting on the broad ambitions of macro-finance, I argue that the commitment to placing finance at the centre of our economic conceptions comes with significant risks that speak directly to the politics of financialisation. By redirecting the focus of economic governance towards finance, macro-finance may consolidate rather than challenge the problematic trends of global finance. More specifically, I argue that the focus of the money view on l…
The Antinomies of Political Marxism
This is a response to the contributions to the symposium on our initial article, ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism: A Historicist Critique’
The Power of Finance in the Age of Market Based Banking
It has long been assumed that marketisation would undermine banks, a claim reflected in the common opposition of market and bank-based finance. But as recent research shows, some banks have flourished in the marketized environment of financialisation. I argue the reason they have come to dominate financialisation stems from a revolution in funding that began in the 1960s with the rise of liability management. This practice enabled some banks to d…
Neoliberal failures and the managerial takeover of governance
The history of neoliberalism is a messy attempt to turn theory into practice. Neoliberals struggled with their plans to implement flagship policies of monetarism, fiscal prudence, and public sector privatisation. Yet, inflation was still cut, welfare slashed, and the public sector ‘marketised’. Existing literature often interprets this as neoliberalism ‘failing-forward’, achieving policy goals by whatever means necessary and at great social cost.…
Rethinking neoliberalism after the Polanyian turn
The last two decades have seen an explosion of writings about neoliberalism insisting on the role of the state as a key architect of market dynamics. Drawing substantially from the work of Karl Polanyi, this literature has emphasised in various ways the socially constructed nature of neoliberalism. But as I argue, conceptual flaws in Polanyi’s conception of 19th liberal governance have helped perpetuate an ongoing reliance on the notion of the Ma…
Polanyi’s double movement and the politics of capitalism
Polanyi’s idea of the double movement has been highly influential to think the politics of capitalism. However, I argue that this notion relies on a problematic concept of the Market inherited from economics, which depoliticizes social reality. While Polanyi believed that it was possible to retain this notion to make sense of the political project of liberals, he underestimated how it hindered his attempt to make sense of the politics he studied.…
Economics (19 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (9 obras) · Political Economy and Marxism (9 obras) · Corporate governance (8 obras) · Neoclassical economics (8 obras)