How does finance affect the politics of everyday life?

This chapter examines two kinds of policy and political responses to the financial crisis–first, how international organisations and governments have responded, and second, how ordinary people and citizens have responded. The policies credit rating agencies prescribed have not varied much: austerity, privatisation, liberalisation. These policies are presented as medicine to ailing economies. But even as economic experts have devised these policies in accordance with technically sophisticated analyses, the implementation of these measures has never been a strictly technical matter. The global political excess, the part of life that cannot be reduced to financial calculation, for example, would be important but rather meagre if it only mattered when everyday life was disrupted by economic austerity measures or anti-austerity demonstrations. Jacques Ranciere is a philosopher who has made a signal contribution to contemporary debates about politics and democracy as well as aesthetics.

Affect (linguistics) · Business · Everyday life · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Communication · Finance · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law