Video is now available from our recent event, Steven Klein and Robert Meister: Authoritarian Capitalism. On February 23, 2023, Steven Klein and Robert Meister discussed the changing relationship between democracy and capitalism in an era of finance. This event was part of 3CT’s New Global Authoritarianisms project. The conversation was moderated by 3CT co-director Kaushik Sunder Rajan with an introduction by co-director Lisa Wedeen.
Klein’s current book project develops a democratic critique of finance that disassociates democracy from the form and fiction of the sovereign state, which he argues is itself a creature of financial structures. Meister’s recent publication Justice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century (University of Chicago Press, 2021) returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality.
