Amin Samman

TL;DR: This article explored the imaginary dimensions of economic crisis through a study of the interface between practices of historical representation and processes of social construction, arguing that a sense of history cannot be disentangled from the phenomena that it strives to apprehend.

TL;DR: The authors make a theoretical contribution to the constructivist and cultural political economy literatures on crisis by developing a set of tools for analysing the meta-historical dimensions of crisis, including a typology that identifies three distinct ways of recalling past crises, and a concept of history-production, which captures how different interpretive practices feed into the diagnosis and negotiation of crisis episodes.

TL;DR: This article found that the idea of the Great Depression has effectively come to function as a kind of historical "black mirror" -a quasi-object within which conjuncture and historical representation interact to produce an image of capitalist history itself.

TL;DR: The past does not simply provide conditions of possibility for capitalist finance; it also serves as a vital resource for those who might seek to understand or negotiate it in a particular present.

TL;DR: The authors develops a critique of linear conceptions of time in political economy, showing how these have produced a vision of historical change at odds with the strange realities of financial capitalism, and advocates a turn from economics and finance theory to the theory and philosophy of history.