Promotional Information

Portfolio Society is a brilliant account of what happens when those at the commanding heights of the economy shift their focus from production to prediction. Rather than bother with the nitty-gritty of making things or providing services directly, they engage in bets on and scoring of those who do. Ascher exposes how this mode of investment transforms risk takers into risk shifters. Portfolio Society is a 'history of the present,' rendered as a thick and yet pellucid description of financial crises. Ascher paints our present conjuncture in expressionistic hues, fleetly dissecting the pat narratives of finance theory. I have never seen restrained horror, gallows humor, and elegant prose so deftly combined in political theory -- and these stylistic achievements match the penetrating analysis in the work. -- Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information Portfolio Society is a fascinating and original contribution to the social theory of finance. Resituating Marxian analysis in a capitalist landscape thoroughly transformed by and through financial instruments, Ascher provides a persuasive critique of contemporary culture, politics, and economy. Essential reading for all scholars interested in the financial economy and the relations of capital it embodies. -- Caitlin Zaloom, author of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London How can Marx help us to renegotiate class, discipline, suffering, and risk in the age of finance capital? In this fascinating book Ivan Ascher shows how. People are forced to participate in the lower reaches of risk society, supporting a system that obscures its workings as it distributes risk and discipline downward. Ascher writes in a lucid, limpid prose that deepens and informs the intuitions of many about the strange power and fragility of 'portfolio society.' An indispensable book for political economists, political theorists, and critical citizens. -- William E. Connolly, author of The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism

About the Author

Ivan Ascher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Reviews

Ascher's incisive essay deserves to play a central role in what I hope will become a movement of thought that brings down the wall between political theory and political economy.—Theory & Event

Portfolio Society sketches out an innovative and exciting theory of class under financial capitalism, which, above all, serves as an invitation for others to think through the implications of Ascher's inventive appropriation of Marx's work.—Cultural Politics

[A] carefully calibrated account of how financial markets affect modern societies that will please inquisitive college freshmen, political theorists and policy-makers alike.—Science and Public Policy

Ascher lifts from Marx certain phrases or tropes or bits of analysis.... and wroks a substitution, inserting a new word, or letter, so as to make Marx's text speak directly to our society.... Hence, the capitalist mode of production becomes the subtitle's capitalist mode of rediction. These detournements are always provocative, and occassionally produce the electric concept short circuit that one associates with a profound pun or a surprising etymological connection.—Contemporary Political Theory

Just as the rhythms of Capital might be said to reflect those of the factories and machines that Marx investigates, Ascher replicates the surface speed and deep complexity of the finance industry with which he is concerned.—Political Theory

Portfolio Society makes an important contribution to theorising the contemporary economy, although it would benefit from greater attention to the detail of financialisation processes and how they are mediated through political and economic systems.—LSE Review of Books