Davies, Will. 2024. Owning Towards Death: The Asset Condition as Existential Conundrum. Finance & Society, ISSN 2059-5999 [Article] (In Press)

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Abstract or Description

Moral and pragmatist sociology has studied capitalism as a set of institutions that require justification, which has historically been offered through forms of rewarding and meaningful work, anchoring the human life course in a narrative of individual and collective progress. However, emerging with neoliberalism, then becoming explicit after 2008, contemporary capitalism has become organised around the logic of assets and wealth as opposed to labour and production. This provokes a vacuum of justification. Once all actors are (as Minsky argued) balance sheet actors and profit becomes a function of sheer temporality, the economy ceases to function as a moral order and instead becomes imbued with existential concerns of temporality, durability, survival, and finitude. Possessed only of certain contingently acquired assets and liabilities, the self becomes wholly contingent in the sense described by Heidegger; that is, as ‘thrown’ into having had a past and into a relationship of ‘care’ towards the future. The article identifies symptoms of this existential condition in empirical studies of wealth elites, for whom (in the absence of conventional liberal and production-based measures of worth) problems of meaning, purpose, and finitude are endemic.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	assets; existentialism; justification; time; wealth
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Politics Politics > Political Economy Research Centre
Dates:	Date Event 26 July 2024 Accepted 15 November 2024 Published Online
Item ID:	37394
Date Deposited:	29 Jul 2024 08:32
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2024 10:05
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37394

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