Ivan Ascher, “Portfolio Society: A Capitalist Mode of Prediction” (Zone Books, 2016)

Ivan Ascher, “Portfolio Society: A Capitalist Mode of Prediction” (Zone Books, 2016)

Is Marx still relevant? Any social scientist will answer with a resounding yes! In what he refers to as a thought experiment, Ivan Ascher uses Marx to understand the financial market. In Portfolio Society: A Capitalist Mode of Prediction (Zone Books, 2016), Ascher focuses on the arc and narratives found in Capital, using them to analyze risk, credit, and the financial market downfall of 2008. Ascher encourages the reader to explore how we might be able to understand what is going on today by looking back at Marx’s understanding of capitalism. The reader will come across familiar characters, like moneybags and vampires, and familiar concepts from Marx, like fetishism and co-dependence within the market. The nice thing about this book is that you do not need prior knowledge of Marx or financial markets, though those who have knowledge of either or both will still find great pleasure in this thought experiment. This book would be enjoyed by sociologists or political scientists in general, alongside those interested in financial markets. It would be especially useful in a theory course where students could make connections between Marx and Ascher’s narratives. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can follow and tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Avsnitt(2163)

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Angie Hobbs, "Why Plato Matters Now" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as An...

14 Jan 1h 18min

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mercedes Valmisa, "All Things Act" (Oxford UP, 2025)

All Things Act explores the collective character of action to expand the ways we think about agency. First, it resists viewing agency as a capacity, much less one exclusive to humans. Instead, it defi...

13 Jan 56min

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

Dagmar Herzog, "The New Fascist Body" (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)

The success of new far-right movements cannot be explained by fear or rage alone – the pleasures of aggression and violence are just as essential. As such, racism is particularly intense when it is er...

13 Jan 1h 4min

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Matthijs Lok, "Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Contemporary Europe seems to be divided between progressive cosmopolitans sympathetic to the European Union and the ideals of the Enlightenment, and counter-enlightened conservative nationalists extol...

12 Jan 56min

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

J. Logan Smilges, "Crip Negativity" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)

In the thirty years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law, the lives of disabled people have not improved nearly as much as activists and politicians had hoped. In Crip Negativ...

10 Jan 57min

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

Caitlin Vincent, "Opera Wars: Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

How can cultural industries survive in the twenty-first century? In Opera Wars Inside the World of Opera and the Battles for Its Future Caitlin Vincent, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at the...

9 Jan 40min

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Keidrick Roy, "American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified c...

8 Jan 51min

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

Thomas Albert Howard, "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History" (Yale UP, 2025)

A sweeping history of the violence perpetrated by governments committed to extreme forms of secularism in the twentieth centuryA popular truism derived from the Enlightenment holds that violence is so...

7 Jan 45min

Populärt inom Vetenskap

p3-dystopia
pojkmottagningen
svd-nyhetsartiklar
dumma-manniskor
allt-du-velat-veta
kapitalet-en-podd-om-ekonomi
det-morka-psyket
4health-med-anna-sparre
sexet
medicinvetarna
halsorevolutionen
rss-vetenskapsradion-2
rss-ufobortom-rimligt-tvivel-2
rss-vetenskapsradion
dumforklarat
rss-spraket
hacka-livet
paranormalt-med-caroline-giertz
bildningspodden
vetenskapsradion