The pioneer of financial derivatives was moved by inherited socialist collective commitments

Evidence

Certainly, the accounts of their motivation provided by central actors in the move to financial derivatives are not of rational egoism. Leo Melamed’s admiration for Friedman sat alongside a political inheritance of quite a different sort. When I asked him why he devoted effort to collective projects, Melamed cited the influence of his father, a member of the Jewish revolutionarysocialist Bund (Melamed interview). Even as a child, Melamed recalls, he was “able to sense the intense feelings [the Bund] generated” in his parents (Melamed and Tamarkin 1996, p. 22). “I will never forget,” he says, “being wedged between them standing rigidly erect at Bund meetings in Bialystok that opened with the Shvue, the Bund’s anthem an oath of allegiance. My mother held my hand tightly as she and my father sang, and I could feel the emotional choking that gripped both of them as they fervently swore never to forsake the battle on behalf of the working class. There among the mass of people with the decibels ringing in my ears, I knew something was going on, something big, something awe-inspiring, something eternal.” — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 674

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the clean separation between market evangelism and radical collective politics; ties to broader performativity arguments about markets’ social construction. — connects to: New derivatives markets initially lacked liquidity and depended on founders’ moral suasion to survive — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 84; Cold rational egoism cannot explain the founding of modern derivatives exchanges — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 678; Postwar socialized risk paradigms grew out of the struggle for collective autonomy — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 250
• SEED: Angle: the ideological hybridity of financial innovators — how the ‘father of futures’ carried Bundist collective morality inside a free-market project.

Broader Connections

• Cold rational egoism cannot explain the founding of modern derivatives exchanges #corroborates (0.80) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 678
• New derivatives markets initially lacked liquidity and depended on founders’ moral suasion to survive #corroborates (0.72) — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 84
• Postwar socialized risk paradigms grew out of the struggle for collective autonomy #expands (0.70) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 250