Abstract
After the Great Complacence is an attempt to rethink the relationship between politics, power and finance in the context of the global financial crisis. It is a joint-authored effort courtesy of the much-respected team from the Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester. The first half of the book mostly concentrates on rethinking preconceptions associated with finance and ‘financial innovation’, before the second half applies this new understanding to make sense of UK and US banking regulation in the context of the crisis.
The main purpose and motivation of the book is both analytical and political. On the one hand, it seeks partly to explain the financial crisis through the idea of ‘bricolage’: ‘the crisis resulted from an accumulation of small, and in themselves relatively harmless, decisions’ (p. 9). This analysis allows the authors to rethink the dominant narratives of the crisis that mostly identify ‘the defective part or [name] the guilty men’ (p. 2). These narratives either frame the crisis as a historical accident or individualise its causes, neither of which logically leads to particularly politically progressive prescriptions.
These aims are brought together through an attempt to reframe the crisis as an ‘elite debacle’. Small mistakes made by individual bankers were exacerbated by the ‘story’ of perfecting the market through deregulation and the ‘ending-boom-and-bust’ hubris of the 2000s, which led to a dysfunctional banking system and a concentration of risk. ‘This complacence was an elite debacle’ (p. 9), because elite actors had completely failed in their duty to safeguard the interests of the public, who must now pay the price for crisis through state-sponsored bail-outs and austerity. Crucially, from a political perspective, this debacle is not an accident ‘because the outcome is not reversible or fixable, or even avoidable next time’ (p. 10).
It is not very often that you see a book recently received to review for an academic journal also listed and celebrated in a mainstream newspaper as a book of the year, as this title was. Indeed, this attempt to engage with non-academic audiences, through minimising social scientific jargon, should be applauded (although some knowledge of financial concepts and instruments is required). Yet this virtue is not at the expense of well-constructed academic arguments or rigorous analysis. The result is an interesting and thought-provoking read for academics, practitioners and interested lay readers alike.