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Ordinary Democracy: Reading Resistances to Debt after the Global Financial Crisis with Stanley Cavell's Ordinary Language Philosophy

par Tooker, Lauren
Président du jury Crespy, Amandine
Promoteur Nahavandy, Firouzeh ;Watson, Matthew
Publication Non publié, 2017-07-19

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

This thesis examines resistances to debt in the afterlives of financial crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) in order to develop a novel account of democratic subjectivity for International Political Economy (IPE). The global financial crisis has transformed debt into a topic of heated public debate, giving rise to new social movements as well as individual political resistances. However, IPE scholars have yet to substantively conceptualise this new democratic politics of debt, despite considerable research on the problems of debt-based models of economic citizenship. I trace this blind spot to the pictures of agency animating the field, before developing a novel conceptual account of democratic subjectivity in finance based on an original application of Stanley Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy in IPE. I then use this account to show how ordinary democratic subjects of debt are opposing debt-based economic citizenship in the UK and the US. To this end, I offer a comparative examination of three prominent tactics of debt resistance: avoiding debt, auditing debt and refusing debt. My central argument is that although contemporary debt resistances are marked by conventional cultural-economic imaginaries of financial capability, transparency and liability, debt’s ‘ordinary democrats’ are reconstructing debt relations as a site of democratic selfhood, exchange and community in finance. In an era marked by an increasingly top-down, managerial politics of finance, I conclude, people’s resistances to debt represent important practices of civic freedom that improve the prospects for democratic financial governance.