Robert Meister: Justice Is an Option

Robert Meister speaks on his recent book, Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Sanjay Seth and Karin Knorr Cetina joined Meister in conversation, with 3CT co-director Lisa Wedeen as moderator.

More than ten years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the financial sector is thriving. But something is deeply wrong. Taxpayers bore the burden of bailing out “too big to fail” banks, but got nothing in return. Inequality has soared, and a populist backlash against elites has shaken the foundations of our political order. Meanwhile, financial capitalism seems more entrenched than ever. What is the left to do?

Justice Is an Option uses those problems—and the framework of finance that created them—to reimagine historical justice. Meister returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance. Instead of closing our eyes to the political and economic realities of our era, we need to grapple with them head-on. Meister does just that, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality. Meister here formulates nothing less than a democratic financial theory for the twenty-first century—one that is equally conversant in political philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Justice Is an Option is a radical, invigorating first page of a new—and sorely needed—leftist playbook.

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Recorded May 24, 2022. All rights to the words and ideas expressed in this video are retained exclusively by their authors. If you would like to reuse a segment of this video, please contact the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory to request permission.

[svenhanson]

The lady claims that in Sweden banks were taken over by the state. I come from Sweden and this is the first time I have heard this. To me that is wrong, it never happened.

[alelita]

Karin Knorr Cetina takes up way too much time