Video is now available from Cédric Durand’s November 7 keynote presentation for the 2025 Lauren Berlant 3CT Graduate Student Conference, Power and Personality in Contemporary Capitalism. Durand’s keynote was titled The Vacant Throne: Institutional Contest for Dominance after the Hegemony of Finance.
Durand’s theoretical proposal here 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.
