Just Financial Markets? Finance in a Just Society

Well-functioning financial markets are crucial for the economic well-being and the justice of contemporary societies. The Great Financial Crisis has shown that a perspective that naively trusts in the self-regulating powers of free markets cannot capture what is at stake in understanding and regulating financial markets. The damage done by the Great Financial Crisis, including its distributive consequences, raises serious questions about the justice of financial markets as we know them. This volume brings together leading scholars from political theory, law, and economics in order to explore the relation between justice and financial markets. Broadening the perspective from a purely economic one to a liberal egalitarian one, the volume explores foundational normative questions about how to conceptualize justice in relation to financial markets, the biases in the legal frameworks of financial markets that produce unjust outcomes, and perspectives of justice on specific institutions and practices in contemporary financial markets. Written in a clear and accessible language, the volume presents analyses of how financial markets (should) function and how the Great Financial Crisis came about, proposals for how the structures of financial markets could be reformed, and analysis of why reform is not happening at the speed that would be desirable from a perspective of justice.

Lisa Herzog is Professor of Political Philosophy and Theory at the Bavarian School of Public Policy at the Technical University Munich. She works on the intersection of economic and political questions, with a focus on the history of economic and political thought, the normative status of markets, and, most recently, the role of complex organizations in markets and their moral status. She is the author of Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory (2013, OUP).