The Central Place Given to The Economic in Our Lives
An investigation of the boundaries of finance emerging at about the same time as sociology cannot avoid questioning how the latter saw the former: how do emerging sociological views on the capitalist order deal with financial markets? This question goes beyond the mere exercise in the history of sociological ideas: it concerns both conceptualization (what notions have explanatory force) and observational mode (how shall we see finance in the context of capitalism).1 It also concerns the nature and character of financial knowledge and its relationship to other forms of social knowledge, as well as to specific social groups.
For many theorists, observation of (economic) knowledge in action meant, among other things, identifying its manifestations on the individual level, its expressions in human types and the related categories of action. It meant finding paradigmatic figures embodying the main principles of finance, figures which constitute the link between this domain and the larger sphere of life and connect individual modes of action to broader social processes. And indeed we encounter in the sociological tradition a continuous preoccupation with the figures generated by the modern order: the expert, the public man, the consumer, the intellectual, the scientist, the writer, the artist—these are only some major examples.
Yet the feeling persists that no account of life under capitalism would be complete without taking into account the main figures of economic life,simply because, since the eighteenth century, these figures have been in creasingly perceived as the focal point of both society and individual lives. In the words of Charles Taylor, “the affirmation of ordinary lives is part of the background to the central place given to the economic in our lives” .
