Auditorium A2, Maison de la paix
Is finance against democracy? The question has been asked repeatedly. But is it the right way to approach the problem? This keynote lecture explores an analytical framework for addressing it, taking as its starting point the position of the financial world in economy and society. It then considers the forms of interactions between finance and politics that this position entails, before discussing the implications for the functioning of democracy. The lecture takes a long-term historical perspective –the long twentieth century– and focuses on the advanced economies of Western Europe and North America usually associated, though not for the entire period, with established democratic regimes.
Youssef Cassis is Professor at the European University Institute, Florence, and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His recent books include Capitals of Capital. The Rise and Fall of International Financial Centres, 1780-2009, (2nd ed. Cambridge UP, 2009), Crises and Opportunities. The Shaping of Modern Finance (Oxford UP, 2011), The Legacy of the Global Financial Crisis, ed. with J.J. van Helten (I.B. Tauris, 2021), and Remembering and Learning from Financial Crises, ed. with C. Schenk (Oxford UP, 2021). He is currently working on ‘The Memory of Financial Crises. Financial Actors and Global Risk’, a project funded by an ERC Advanced Grant.
This is the public event of the conference hosted by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in collaboration with the Centre for Finance and Development and the Department of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute.