The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy and How to Rebuild It

Finance serves the rich and powerful. We need to democratize it.

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? In The Master’s Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer can be found in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital.

Today, finance guides and constrains our politics, but there is no reason why this must be so. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of institutional transformation rooted in the interconnectedness of finance and democracy.

Inspired by ancient Athens, where small groups chosen by lottery were used to ensure democratic participation, he shows how democracy and working-class power can be strengthened by introducing new forms of financial governance, focusing on the inclusion of historically excluded groups.

His proposals for democratic financial institutions point the way to imbuing finance with a socio-environmental purpose and the funding of a just green transition, social housing, and other necessary public goods. And these financial institutions might be the first step toward a whole new kind of economy.

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Marquette University and former Berggruen Research Fellow at the University of Southern California. His research is on capitalism and democracy. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions was published in 2017 with Cornell University Press. The book was awarded with the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. He has written extensively for public audiences as outlets such as Boston Review, Jacobin Magazine, Noema Magazine, and The Washington Post.