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Power and Personality in Contemporary Capitalism
Friday, November 7, 2025, 9:30am–7:00pmSaturday, November 8, 2025, 10:00am–3:45pm
The conversion of the real economy into a maze of financial assets has accentuated the impersonal experience of capitalist domination. Capitalist profits have never before depended so heavily on abstraction of and from productive and reproductive processes. Yet, capitalist power has rarely been so personal: we live in a time of “strongmen” and their acolytes.
Decades of neoliberal governance have subsidized capital gains and gutted economic assistance programs. Today, getting rich requires owning appreciating assets, and the entities responsible for managing those assets wield a stunning amount of power. Value resides in increasingly obscure financial instruments. Simultaneously, private finance is pouring into the care economy, gobbling up basic services and pensions, and staking massive real estate claims. All these necessary things—and the people who provide and rely on them—have been turned into numbers on a spreadsheet. The impersonal has expressed itself all too personally.
The richest Americans use so-called “family offices” to manage their mind-boggling private wealth. Self-dealing and grift have become dominant cultural and economic modes. In the ultra-online “manosphere,” influencers peddle self-improvement slop and misogyny alongside digital assets and get-rich-quick schemes. Meanwhile, President Trump and his lackeys use the office of the executive to grow their personal fortunes and settle personal scores in a move of right-wing state capture hardly specific to the US.
How might we theorize the simultaneous depersonalization and hyper-personalization of capitalist life?
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7
Foster 107
9:30–10:00am
Breakfast and registration
10:00–10:15am
Welcome remarks
10:15–11:45am
Labor, precarity, and social reproduction
Juliette Marchant, Harvard University
“Caring for Profit: Elder Care, Capitalism and the Family”
Carol Iglesias, University of Chicago
“Pawned Platforms: Reproducing Oil Work Under Corporate Debt and Imposed Informality”
Agasthya Vedre-Kyanam, University of Michigan
“Charismatic Logistics in Life Science & Healthcare Supply Chains and its Consequences”
Discussant: Gabriel Winant
11:45am–12:00pm
Break
12:00–1:30pm
Authority and economic governance
Soren Dudley, Harvard University
“Spectacle Politics: Expressive depoliticization in post-neoliberalism”
Alexandre Aloy, University of California, Santa Barbara
“The Neoliberal Path to Power, Beyond Force and Deception: Populist Rhetoric and Appeal in Neoliberal Theory”
Simon Rakei, University of Michigan
“Values of Sovereignty: Law and Political Economy in the Modern Formation of Offshore Finance”
Helin Kotan, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Agency Against All Odds: Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Migrant Labor, and Neoliberalism from Below”
Discussant: Jamie Merchant
1:30–2:30pm
Lunch
2:30–4:00pm
Assetization and the private sphere in the Global South
My Nguyen, University of Chicago
“Leap of Faith: A Fairy Tale Guide to Vietnamese Industrialization”
Marina Moscoso, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
“The quiet eviction of the ordinary: assetization of public school buildings in Santurce, Puerto Rico”
Aman Roy, CUNY Graduate Center
“Renting the Commons: Planning and Politics in Nagpur, India”
Discussant: Elizabeth Chatterjee
4:00–4:30pm
Break
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Social Science Research Building Tea Room, 2nd Floor
4:30–6:00pm
Keynote
Cédric Durand
“The Vacant Throne: Institutional Contest for Dominance after the Hegemony of Finance”
6:00–7:00pm
Reception
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8
Foster 107
10:00–10:30am
Breakfast
10:30am–12:00pm
Capitalism, gender, and affect
Vladislav Zemenkov, University of Chicago
“Desire for More: Literary Delusionships and the Affective Logic of Contemporary Capitalism”
Adora Svitak, Yale University
“Working to Love: Expertise and Effort in Elites’ Romantic Relationships”
Phi Bachsleitner, University of Chicago
“The Pink Pill: Contemporary Capitalism and The ‘Feminisation’ of Men”
Discussant: Agnes Malinowska
12:00–1:00pm
Lunch
1:00–2:30pm
Theories of capital and collateral
Lukas Müller-Wünsch, University of Chicago
“Capital as a Perpetual Liability”
Nikhil Sood, CUNY Graduate Center
“Affective Derivatives: Human Capital in the Age of Predictive Finance”
Moad Musbahi, Princeton University
“Collateral in the Central Sahara, on forms and effects”
Discussant: Robert Meister
2:30–2:45pm
Break
2:45–3:45pm
Closing roundtable
Cédric Durand
“The Vacant Throne: Institutional Contest for Dominance after the Hegemony of Finance”
Friday, November 7, 2025, 4:30–6:00pm
Social Science Research Building Tea Room, 2nd Floor
The conversation of our time is trapped between the Charybde of the remnants of neoclassical economics and the Scylla of the polycrisis narrative. On Charybde’s side, nothing can happen; we are stuck in a historical dead-end of a never-ending prospect of optimization of the same relations. On Scylla’s side, on the contrary, everything can happen. However, with such an unbounded uncertainty, there is no space for meaningful human historicity either. The complex interlocking of multifaceted crisis dynamics—ranging from ecological issues to wars and from financial disruption to political instability—leaves us overwhelmed by an unthinkable conjuncture, ultimately destroying the very possibility of engaging strategically with the prospect of change.
This communication aims to explore the epistemological space between these two pitfalls, with the ambition of deciphering the post-neoliberal/end of financial hegemony interregnum in which we are living, in further perspective. My primary theoretical proposal is to revive and rejuvenate the structuralist foundations of the French Regulationist school, which account for the causality in the unfolding of accumulation regimes. This tradition examines the hierarchized articulation of institutions that regulate accumulation regimes and seeks the causal mechanisms that lead to the unraveling of macroeconomic regularities.
In this perspective, great crises, such as the one we have been living through since 2008, are moments of increased contingency, an interregnum where several institutional forms can pretend to the throne, i.e., the dominant role in structural causation.
Organized by Kaya Colakoglu, Max Hancock, Alec Israeli, Olivia Jenkins, and 3CT; co-sponsored by the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
