ABSTRACT
The ascension of finance in recent decades was accompanied with intermittent episodes of crisis, a dazzling complexity of novel financial instruments and the spread of investment practices into the fabric of everyday life. The multidisciplinary approach of international political sociology is hence specifically well positioned to push for novel insights about the contemporary world of finance. Finance is the specific economic service that deals with the provision and transmission of abstract monetary values. One important mechanism for the creation of the objectivity of financial values is the act of establishing a boundary that constitutes what counts as the rational, efficient and realist allocation of credit and money. The basic contention that finance is political is neither self-evident nor uncontested. For example liberal positions that have as their premise that money is a neutral and transparent abstract medium of economic valuations find politics only in the corrupted aberrations from money’s supposed neutrality.
