Bruno Latour

Vincent Antonin Lépinay

How can economics become genuinely quantitative? This is the question that French sociologist Gabriel Tarde tackled at the end of his career, and in this pamphlet, Bruno Latour and Vincent Antonin Lépinay offer a lively introduction to the work of the forgotten genius of nineteenth-century social thought. Tarde's solution was in total contradiction to the dominant views of his time: to quantify the connections between people and goods, you need to grasp "passionate interests." In Tarde's view, capitalism is not a system of cold calculations--rather it is a constant amplification in the intensity and reach of passions. In a stunning anticipation of contemporary economic anthropology, Tarde's work defines an alternative path beyond the two illusions responsible for so much modern misery: the adepts of the Invisible Hand and the devotees of the Visible Hand will learn how to escape the sterility of their fight and recognize the originality of a thinker for whom everything is intersubjective, hence quantifiable. At a time when the regulation of financial markets is the subject of heated debate, Latour and Lépinay provide a valuable historical perspective on the fundamental nature of capitalism.

An Introduction to Gabriel Tarde's Economic Anthropology

The Science of Passionate Interests

A behind-the-scenes account of the derivatives business at a major investment bank The financial industry's invention of complex products such as credit default swaps and other derivatives has been widely blamed for triggering the global financial crisis of 2008. In Codes of Finance, Vincent Antonin Lépinay, a former employee of one of the world’s leading investment banks, takes readers behind the scenes of the equity derivatives business at the bank before the crisis, providing a detailed firsthand account of the creation, marketing, selling, accounting, and management of these financial instruments—and of how they ultimately created havoc inside and outside the bank.

Engineering Derivatives in a Global Bank

Codes of Finance

Codes of Finance is an ethnography of a global bank inventing new derivative products. It describes the multiple languages invented to describe and control these new products. It analyzes the recent discussions about financial derivatives and offers a new framework to understand financial innovation.

Vincent Antonin Lépinay

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