Political authority now derives support from imagined credibility of promised futures.

Evidence

For Brown, under late neoliberalism this becomes a full-blown conflict between the modern homo economicus and homo politicus, with the latter having been “vanquished” by the former. Above all, the alleged growing dominance of neoliberalism’s economic rationality reflects a change in the ways capitalism derives and renews what Beckert (2020) defines as its “promissory legitimacy”: the perceived (that is, imagined) credibility of promises of the future through which political authority gains support. To put it plainly: according to these critiques, the modern homo politicus has not only been ensnared by the homo economicus, but it has also “bought into” the imagined futures promised by neoliberal reason. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 73

Above all, the alleged growing dominance of neoliberalism’s economic rationality reflects a change in the ways capitalism derives and renews what Beckert (2020) defines as its “promissory legitimacy”: the perceived (that is, imagined) credibility of promises of the future through which political authority gains support. … To put it plainly: according to these critiques, the modern homo politicus has not only been ensnared by the homo economicus, but it has also “bought into” the imagined futures promised by neoliberal reason. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 110

Above all, the alleged growing dominance of neoliberalism’s economic rationality reflects a change in the ways capitalism derives and renews what Beckert (2020) defines as its “promissory legitimacy”: the perceived (that is, imagined) credibility of promises of the future through which political authority gains support. To put it plainly: according to these critiques, the modern homo politicus has not only been ensnared by the homo economicus, but it has also “bought into” the imagined futures promised by neoliberal reason. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 110

Categorization

• DEFINE: Beckert’s ‘promissory legitimacy’ is essential machinery for explaining how financialized promise-making becomes the ground of political authority.
• XREF: Promissory legitimacy connects to the reader’s focus on financialized populism as speculative bets on imagined futures rather than self-interested voting.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does promissory legitimacy collapse when the promised futures fail to materialize? This could connect to the 2008 crash as a legitimacy crisis.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 73; Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 110