Introduction

This introduction presents an overall view of key concepts discussed in the chapters of this book. The book stages an encounter, or dialogic conversation, between key aspects of a sympathetic political economy and central features of 'economistic liberalism' of economic governance today. It explores the status of contemporary economic governance and the limits of its ethical imagination, by combining Adam Smith's under-utilised ethical theory and political economy with analysis of finance in crisis. Many existing understandings of and responses to the global financial crisis (GFC) are subject to a crisis of ethical imagination. The conceptual and empirical debates largely centre on Anglo-American finance, along with some broader appeals to issues of global financial governance in a wider sense. The book also provides a renewal of Smith that draws attention to his understanding of market oriented behaviour constituted by sympathetic interpersonal relations. It concludes with how interventions of everyday politics help in efforts to 'rethink' finance along more sympathetic lines.