Heterodox Economics vis-à-vis Crisis and Finance.Speculation of the ‘absentee rentier’ or Mechanism of disciplining social action?

The 2007-2008 financial crisis is without precedent in the post-war period, a fact
acknowledged by the majority of economists. At the same time, the crisis is a ‘marginal
moment’ which unveils and helps us rethink the workings of contemporary capitalism. The
latter is mostly grasped under the term of financialization in relevant discussions.


Recent heterodox literature is dominated by a single and persistent argument. The
argument2 is that contemporary financial liberalization should be approached as a process in
which the financial elites and financial intermediaries, i.e. the absentee financial proprietors
or contemporary rentiers in the Keynesian terminology, have a leading role in working out
the details of the neoliberal form of capitalism. Writing in the mid 1930s, Keynes (1973: 377)
predicted the eventual extinction (“euthanasia”) of the rentiers “within one or two
generations”. Many present-day Keynesians portray the developments of the last decades as
the return of the rentiers three generations later to take over the economy. Neoliberalism thus
amounts to the “revenge of the rentiers” (Smithin 1996: 84, coins this phrase) over the
“industrial community” of managers , technicians and workers.

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