Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age, Hardcover

The extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation--among companies, governments, and individuals--generated by financialization.

The hegemony of finance compels a new orientation for everyone and everything: companies care more about the moods of their shareholders than about longstanding commercial success; governments subordinate citizen welfare to appeasing creditors; and individuals are concerned less with immediate income from labor than with appreciation of their capital goods, skills, connections, and reputations. In this book, in clear and compelling prose, Michel Feher explains the extraordinary shift in conduct and orientation generated by financialization.

That firms, states, and people depend more on their ratings than on the product of their activities also changes how capitalism is resisted. For activists, the focus of grievances shifts from the extraction of profit to the conditions under which financial institutions allocate credit. While the exploitation of employees by their employers has hardly been curbed, the power of investors to select investees--to decide who and what is deemed creditworthy--has become a new site of social struggle. Above all, Feher articulates the new political resistances and aspirations that investees draw from their rated agency.

Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University, where he directs the Whitney Humanities Center. His books include Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others; Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera; and The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact.