Journal Articles

SPIRITS IN THE NIGHT: Reasonableness and the etho-politics of securities law

---

As the faith in a rational and efficient market collapses there has been a frantic search to account for the irrational motives underwriting economic behavior. A new popular discourse of economics grounded in behaviorism, models of social contagion, and the sociobiology of affect has emerged. We focus on one particularly influential instantiation of this new discourse, George Akerlof and Robert Schiller's work on Animal Spirits, which marries behavioral and neuro-economics to Keynes' insights on the role of affect on economic fluctuation. Animal Sprits, we contend, is an attempt to define the parameters of and establish the strategies for the etho-political governance of the economy. To trace the historical emergence of this mode of etho-politics, we examine the contestation over what constitutes reasonable ethical demands on finance capital as they were formulated during the debates surrounding the passage of the 1933 Securities Act. We conclude that through re-examining this debate about the vulnerability of investors and the limits of the ethical demands this vulnerability warrants, we can recover reasonableness as a critical ideal to contest the terms of etho-politics, so as to alter what economists and policy-makers consider radical and necessary.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Cultural Studies

Call Number

-

Publisher

Hoboken, United States : Routledge Taylor & Francis Group., 2010

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

09502386

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Volume 24, Issue 3 May 2010 , pages 356 - 374

Subject(s)

Etho-politics
Animal spirits
Reasonableness
Securities act

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment