Disenchanting Global Justice: Liberalism, Capitalism and Finance
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Disenchanting Global Justice: Liberalism, Capitalism and Finance Anahı´ Wiedenbru¨g University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6GG, UK [email protected] Tim Hayward University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, UK [email protected] John O’Neill University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK john.f.o’[email protected]
Contemporary Political Theory (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00440-2
Hayward’s Global Justice and Finance is a wakeup call for all those working in contemporary, normative, liberal political theory. His general normative outlook gets very uncomfortable for the political liberals working within the global justice tradition. For Hayward, the problem with the global financial architecture does not reside in deviations from an otherwise just background structure. Illicit financial flows are but the tip of the iceberg and even an analysis of the global financial architecture as a whole gets us only a couple of meters beneath sea level. Despite the devastating social, economic and environmental consequences that financialization brought about, at the end of the day, financialization is only a bad solution to much further reaching problems with both capitalism and liberalism. Behind the hidden abode of global finance stands a privatized global constitution that works in the interests of a small financial elite, who – so Hayward shows – may even have an active material interest in the perpetuation of war. Any prescriptive solution that does not take this empirical diagnosis of the global order seriously will (at best) prove utterly inadequate.
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory www.palgrave.com/journals
Critical Exchange
It comes as no surprise, then, that the solution proposals made by effective altruists and proponents of the tax and fund approach among global justice scholars are deemed insufficient. But Global Justice and Finance does much more than painting a dim picture of reality and offering a thorough critique of those global justice theories that continue to uphold that easy-fix, win-win solutions for global injustice exist. Indeed, Global Justice and Finance can be read as an invitation both for a new research agenda for political theorists and for a new way of conducting this research. First, Hayward’s book invites us to bring the political-economic critique of capitalism back into political theory. After the cultural and democratic turn in social critique that replaced the Marxian focus, most of the literature in social and political theory became disconnected from the critique of the political economy of capitalism. Hayward highlights just how central this type of critique is, by exposing how making certain assumptions about the nature of money can undermine the ambitions of distributive and global justice scholars. Political theorists participating in the distributive and global justice debates cannot simply assume that justice will be served once we find an answer to the contentious question of how much (money) is owed to whom.
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