Financialization drives a nonlinear shift from rational to imaginative economic man

Evidence

I understand financialization to be the driving force behind this momentous historical shift from a rationality-driven homo economicus to an imagination-fueled homo speculans. The transition I document here, however, is neither a rupture nor a serialized shift. As Giovanni Arrighi’s and Fernand Braudel’s magisterial histories have shown, the development from earlier industrial forms of capitalism to modern finance has been nonlinear. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 26

Categorization

• XREF: Arrighi and Braudel long-wave capital theory framing the shift as nonlinear resembles the kind of longue-duree treatment in the Frankfurt School economic histories — worth cross-checking. — connects to: Economic-man identity drives endless escalating consumption of commodities — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 388; Post-1971 financialization and the creativity discourse rose in tandem as allied forces — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 50; Mainstream financialization critique sees homo politicus vanquished by an all-consuming homo economicus — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 73