“Total Exemption from Trouble and from Risk”: Adam Smith on the Time of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Abstract

Despite Adam Smith’s seemingly firm entrenchment within the liberal tradition, in Theory of Moral Sentiments, he forwards several positions that fundamentally challenge this understanding. Chief among them is his argument that society is necessarily prior to the individual and that our socio-political context therefore shapes our perception of future possibilities. Thus, rational deliberation is not an ahistorical and universal phenomenon, but one that is structured by the context in which it occurs. Moreover, in Wealth of Nations, Smith brings this understanding to bear on socioeconomic relationships, demonstrating how they shape a person’s temporal imagination, and consequently, their perception of self-interest. Far from adhering to a belief in the supremacy of rational self-interest, Smith actually helps us understand how different social contexts can engender profoundly irrational behavior. Using the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis as its primary case study, this article demonstrates that Smith’s analysis offers a novel and penetrating approach to analyzing fiscal crises, while offering a generative approach for developing mitigating interventions.

Keywords:

• Adam Smith
• temporality
• economic crisis
• liberalism
• rationality
• subprime mortgage

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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3 Yuliya Demyanyk and Otto Van Hemert, “Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” The Review of Financial Studies 24, no. 6 (2011): 1848–80; Mudit Kapoor, “These People Predicted the 2008 Recession and Were Laughed At!,” Business Today September 28, 2018, https://www.businesstoday.in/latest/story/these-people-predicted-the-2008-recession-and-were-laughed-at-109924-2018-09-28.; Niyazi Kurnaz et al., “Managerial and Supervisory Mistakes Leading to Foreseeable Consequence: Global Financial Crisis,” 2010, 10.

4 D. D. Raphael, The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy (New York, NY: Clarendon Press, 2007), 115.

5 Alexander Broadie, “Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 165.

6 Alan Greenspan, “Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan at the Adam Smith Memorial Lecture, Kirkcaldy, Scotland,” Federal Reserve (2005), https://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/20050206/.

7 Ibid.

8 Joy Blenman, “Adam Smith and ‘The Wealth of Nations,’” Investopedia February 6, 2020, https://www.investopedia.com/updates/adam-smith-wealth-of-nations.; P. J. O’Rourke, “On ‘The Wealth of Nations,’” The New York Times, January 7, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/books/chapters/0107-1st-orou.html?smid=url-shar.

9 N. Gregory Mankiw, Principles of Economics, Eighth edition (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2018).

10 Spencer J. Pack, Capitalism as a Moral System: Adam Smith’s Critique of the Free Market Economy (Cheltenham, United Kingdom: Edward Elgar, 2010); Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge Studies in Economics, Choice, and Society (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Chris Clarke, Ethics and Economic Governance: Using Adam Smith to Understand the Global Financial Crisis (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020).

11 Deborah Boucoyannis, “The Equalizing Hand: Why Adam Smith Thought the Market Should Produce Wealth Without Steep Inequality,” Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 4 (2013): 1051–70; Samuel Fleischacker, “Adam Smith and the Left,” in Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley (Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2016); Iain McLean, Adam Smith, Radical and Egalitarian: An Interpretation for the Twenty-First Century (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

12 For more on the development of the trajectory of Smith’s thought specifically within political theory, see the work of D.D. Raphael, Keith Tribe, and Stephen Darwall Raphael, The Impartial Spectator; Keith Tribe, “Adam Smith: Critical Theorist?,” Journal of Economic Literature 37, no. 2 (1999): 609–32; Stephen Darwall, “Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 28, no. 2 (1999): 139–64.

13 Clarke, Ethics and Economic Governance, 5.

14 This history is read by classical economists as a demonstration of the inevitable development of private property and capitalism. However, as Istvan Hont notes, “it is clear that Smith was not writing a history of property but…a history of inequality.” Istvan Hont, Béla Kapossy, and Michael Sonenscher, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 77.

15 What Smith terms commercial society we would today call early capitalism.

16 In comparison to the first, second, and third stages of society, commercial society, as Smith understands it, effectively eliminates the direct dependence of fixed class hierarchies or universal equality in poverty and provides an institutional framework in which the pursuit of private interest is compatible with the public good and in which wealth is more broadly distributed. See: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. W. B. Todd, A. S. Skinner, and R. H. Campbell, The Glasgow Edition (New York, NY, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) (III.iv.11-18;419-422).

17 “It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the publick, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the publick, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” Ibid. (I.xi.p.10;267).

18 Not least of which is the ability of the wealthy to weaponize the public esteem granted people of means to seek political protections from risk and to persuade the ruling class “to give up [their] own interest and that of the publick,” despite the fact that the interests of “the people who commonly employ the largest capitals…is always in some respects different from, and even opposite that of the publick.” Ibid. (I.xi.p.10; 266-7).

19 Ibid. (IV.vi.22; 553).

20 Ibid. (IV.ii.44; 471–2).

21 Ibid. (IV.vii.30; 654).

22 Ibid. (IV.ii.36.n48; 467).

23 It is important to note here that many central concepts of political philosophy have taken on new meanings since the early modern moment. While a thorough accounting of such linguistic shifts is beyond the scope of this article, care has been taken to note or contextualize meaningful differences where applicable.

24 Adam Smith, “History of Astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross, The Glasgow Edition (New York, NY, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) (II.8-12; 41-47); Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1991) (III.i.2; 109-110).

25 The seminal example of such philosophy is Descartes’ “Mind-body dualism.” René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

26 This is true of our personal history, in which a person’s “past experience…checks the impetuosity of his passion, and helps him to correct the too partial views which self-love might otherwise suggest” Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1991 (III.iv.12; 161). It is also true of our place in history, as Smith illuminates with his consideration of labor under various socioeconomic relationships, be they enslavement, apprenticeships, or at-will employment.

27 “When we read in history,” we do not find through reflection “that there are certain general rules which declare all actions of one kind admirable…. Those general rules, on the contrary, are formed from the experience we have had” in society. Ibid. (III.iv.9; 160). Consequently, we “endeavour to examine our own conduct,” we must do so imagining how “any other fair and impartial spectator would imagine it.” Ibid. (III.i.2; 110). In this way, Smith shows how our faculty for judgment is born of society.

28 Smith illustrates this point by using spatial distance as a proxy for temporal distance. From the perspective of his own writing desk, which distorts “an immense landscape of lawns, and woods, and distant mountains,” making them appear to “do no more than cover the little window” nearby. In order to “form some judgment” of the “real proportions” of the “great objects” in the distance as compared to the “little objects” close at hand, it is necessary, he writes, to transport “myself at least in fancy, to a different station, from whence I can survey both at nearly equal distance.” By imagination, however, we can assume a perspective of equidistance in space as well as time and adopt a disinterested perspective that allows us to view our own motivations neutrally. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1991 (III.iii.4; 135).

29 As Griswold notes, “we have no determinate moral selves ‘there’ waiting to be made transparent.” Charles L. Griswold Jr., “Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Companions to Philosophy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106.

30 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1991 (III.i.3; 110).

31 As Forman-Barzilai contends, for Smith, conscience begins with the internalization of habits and social norms because it is a function of social experience. Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism and Moral Theory, Ideas in Context 96 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13–18.

32 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1991 (VII.iii.2.7; 320); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 379.

33 It is worth noting that the state and the statecraft to which Smith refers is quite different from today, writing as he was in the context of the emergence of law-governed monarchies, of which he was a fan, as well as the American Revolution, of which he was decidedly not. Despite these differences, his criticisms of political capture, his view on the ethical role of the state vis-à-vis the public, and his understanding of the appropriate nature of political interventions hold and have much to offer contemporary citizens of neoliberal governments. For a more thorough accounting of Smith’s political context and outlook, see Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion, third print., first paperback edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 246–49; Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 96–104; Hont, Kapossy, and Sonenscher, Politics in Commercial Society, 106–8.

34 “A person who can acquire no property,” he argues, “can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible.” Smith, Wealth of Nations (III.ii.9; 387-8). Moreover, should an enslaved person propose any improvement…his [enslaver] would be very apt to consider the proposal as the suggestion of laziness.” Ibid. (IV.ix.47; 684). Meanwhile, “a man of large revenue, whatever may be his profession, thinks he out…to spend a great part of his time in festivity, in vanity, and in dissipation.” Ibid. (V.i.3.42; 813-4).

35 Smith, Wealth of Nations (I.x.2.14; 139).

36 “An apprentice is likely to be idle,” Smith writes, “because he has no immediate interest to be otherwise” since “during the continuance of the apprenticeship, the whole labour of the apprentice belongs to his master.” For the years spent as an apprentice, one’s labor and wages belong to the master, thus disconnecting the expense of time in the present from future rewards, thus incentivizing idleness, which is “always disadvantageous to the apprentice.” Ibid. (I.x.b.8; 119), (I.x.c.11-16; 138-140).

37 Ibid. (I.viii.12; 84).

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid. (I.viii.14; 85).

40 While Smith does argue that extreme economic inequality is neither efficient nor sustainable, his primary argument is normative. This is a consequence of his assertion that inequality “seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education” Ibid. (I.ii.4; 29). Moreover, insofar as Smith understands that inequality has a social cause, the amelioration of poverty becomes a social responsibility. To this end, he argues against both absolute and relative poverty, arguing that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloth and lodge the whole body of people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed, and lodged” Ibid. (I.viii.36; 96).

41 Smith, Wealth of Nations (III.ii.14; 391).

42 Ibid. (III.iv.13; 421).

43 Protections included entitling an evicted tenant to damages, protecting the validity of leases if the land is sold to another proprietor, and in England, life-long leases, and voting privileges to tenants Ibid. (III.ii.14-16; 391-393).

44 Ibid. (III.ii.14; 392).

45 Ibid. (III.ii.14; 392).

46 Smith was the first to offer such a materialist interpretation of history, to which Marx himself acknowledged an intellectual debt, despite his criticisms. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968).

47 The “man of systems” he argues, “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board” Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1991 (VI.ii.2.17; 233-4).

48 Smith, Wealth of Nations (IV.viii.30; 654).

49 Smith argues there is a practical duty to increase the productivity of a society as a means of accommodating social and political progress, and also a moral duty to “the right one has to the free use of his person and in a word to do what he has a mind when it does not prove detrimental to any other person” Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein, The Glasgow Edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978) (i.II.13; 8).

50 Smith, Wealth of Nations (III.ii.16; 393).

51 Ibid.

52 Merchant’s thoughts, he explains, “are commonly exercised rather about the interest of their own particular branch of business, than about that of the society, their judgment, even when given with the greatest candour…is much more to be depended upon with regard to the former of those two objects, than with regard to the latter.” Ibid. (I.xi.p.10; 266). McNally also offers an extended discussion of Smith’s treatment of merchant’s and manufacturer’s deception of the public to increase profits David McNally, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (New York, NY: Verso, 1993), 51–55.

53 It is important to distinguish Smith’s critique of the corporations of joint stock companies from his criticisms of mercantilist and monopolistic policies. As Sankar Muthu effectively argues, Smith does not view these corporations as “simply subunits of states.” Rather, “in Smith’s view, joint stock companies concentrated, exercised, and abused their institutional power in unique ways” Sankar Muthu, “Adam Smith’s Critique of International Trading Companies: Theorizing ‘Globalization’ in the Age of Enlightenment,” Political Theory 36, no. 2 (2008): 186.

54 Smith writes, “As he grows up, he soon learns that some care and foresight are necessary for providing the means of gratifying those natural appetites. In the proper direction of this care and foresight consists the art of preserving and increasing what is called his external fortune.” Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (VI.i.2; 212).

55 Ibid. (IV.2.6; 189).

56 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 213.

57 Smith, Wealth of Nations (V.i.e.16; 740).

58 Contemporary readers are likely most familiar with limited liability in the form of limited liability companies (LLCs), which only emerged in the U.S. in the 1970s, while Smith’s criticism of limited liability is that held by the directors of joint stock companies. However, the nature of limited liability and its contemporary expressions holds despite varying other differences in organization.

59 Smith, Wealth of Nations (V.i.e.16-17; 740-1).

60 Ibid. (V.i.e.18; 741).

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid. (I.xi.p.10; 267).

64 Ibid. (I.xi.p.10; 266).

65 Smith writes at length about the deceptions of wealth, and how societies mistakenly take wealth as an indication of virtue and respectability. See, for example, his discussion of the “poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition” Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1991 (IV.1.8; 181-3).

66 Smith, Wealth of Nations (IV.vii.c.43; 605).

67 Ibid. (IV.vii.c.63; 613).

68 Ibid. (IV.ii.44; 472).

69 Ibid. (IV.viii.30; 654).

70 Yuliya Demyanyk and Otto Van Hemert, “Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” The Review of Financial Studies 24, no. 6 (2011): 1848–80; Amiyatosh Purnanandam, “Originate-to-Distribute Model and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” The Review of Financial Studies 24, no. 6 (2011): 1881–1915.

71 Joe Lamport, “Predatory Lending Fuels Rise in Foreclosures,” Gotham Gazette April 26, 2007, https://www.gothamgazette.com/development/3538-predatory-lending-fuels-rise-in-foreclosure.; Mark Thoma, “Predatory Borrowing?,” Economist’s View, April 4, 2007, https://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/04/it_takes_two_to.htm.

72 Lawrence Kudlow and Stephen Moore, “Are the Clintons the Real Housing Crash Villains?,” CNBC (May 2016), https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/28/are-the-clintons-the-real-housing-crash-villains.html.; John Carney, “Here’s How the Community Reinvestment Act Led to the Housing Bubble’s Lax Lending,” Business Insider, June 27, 2009, https://www.businessinsider.com/the-cra-debate-a-users-guide-2009-6#:˜:text=The%20structure%20of%20the%20CRA,for%20lax%20CRA%20lending%20standards.

73 For an accounting of narratives within heterodox and leftist traditions, see Martijn Konings, Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

74 Real property refers to a plot of land plus anything growing on it, attached to it, or permanently erected on it. It is difficult to assess because it is inherently unique, and therefore difficult to assess according to a standard scale like other property such as vehicles or jewelry. Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination,” California Law Review 94, no. 1 (2006): 101–47.

75 Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 93–114.

76 Along with a five-year term, mortgages also required a 50% down payment, no amortization, and balloon payments, virtually ensuring they were only extended to the wealthy. Ibid.

77 Aside from a twenty-five-year self-amortizing term, FHA-insured mortgages required only 10% down, and offered a fixed interest rate, thereby creating the stability, duration, and accessibility that allowed large segments of the public to act for the sake of a long-term future. Ibid.

78 In their own valuations, the FHA adopted the Homeowners Loan Corporation’s policy of redlining, which explicitly tied property value and creditworthiness to race. For instance, the 1936 FHA underwriting manual stated that, “The infiltration of inharmonious racial groups will…tend to lower the levels of land values and to lessen the desirability of residential areas.” This, in addition to a number of other discriminatory policies, led to the systematic exclusion of people of color from credit institutions generally, and the housing market in particular. Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space.”

79 Daniel Immergluck, Credit to the Community: Community Reinvestment and Fair Lending Policy in the United States, Cities and Contemporary Society (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), 266.

80 Cathy Lesser Mansfield, “The Road to Subprime ‘HEL’ Was Paved with Good Congressional Intentions: Usury Deregulation and the Subprime Home Equity Market,” South Carolina Law Review 51, no. 3 (2000): 520–32.

81 Kathleen C. Engel and Patricia A. McCoy, “A Tale of Three Markets: The Law and Economics of Predatory Lending,” Texas Law Review 80, no. 6 (2002): 1275.

82 Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space,” 120.

83 Kurt Eggert, “Held up in Due Course: Predatory Lending, Securitization, and the Holder in Due Course Doctrine,” Creighton Law Review 35 (2002): 553.

84 Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space,” 120.

85 Eggert, “Held up in Due Course,” 537.

86 1968 also marked the privatization of Fannie Mae, and soon after, the creation of Freddie Mac, which created a fundamental conflict of interest between the GSE’s public mission to “promote access to mortgage credit throughout the Nation,” and the market imperative to “maximize shareholder value.” Such a combination of government protections and market deregulations ultimately led to Fannie and Freddy holding 40% of all mortgages Julie Andersen Hill, “Shifting Losses: The Impact of Fannie’s and Freddie’s Conservatorships on Commercial Banks,” 35 Hamline L. Rev. 343, 2012.

87 Eggert, “Held up in Due Course,” 537.

88 Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space,” 118.

89 Ronnie Cohen and Shannon O’Byrne, “Law, Emotion, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” GPSolo 29, no. 1 (2012): 67.

90 Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space,” 128.

91 For more on the role of credit rating agencies and the mechanisms by which shortsighted and self-destructive behavior became the norm in mortgage lending, see Timothy J. Sinclair, To the Brink of Destruction: America’s Rating Agencies and Financial Crisis, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

92 Cohen and O’Byrne, “Law, Emotion, and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” 66.

93 Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space” 121–22.

94 David Harvey, The Urbanization of Capital: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 20.

95 The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act sought to reduce discriminatory credit practices and get banks into low and moderate income neighborhoods, but the 1994 Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act repealed restrictions on interstate banking, leading to a surge in bank merger and acquisition, and making it possible for traditional lenders to abandon these neighborhoods, which they did. R. Christopher Whalen, “The Subprime Crisis—Cause, Effect and Consequences,” Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law 17, no. 3 (2008): 219–35.

96 Ineffective regulation allowed lenders to expand their business by engaging in predatory practices that included, “negative amortization, where payments are structured so they do not even cover interest; prepayment penalties that keep borrowers from refinancing at lower rates; excessive fees; loan flipping, where creditors pressure borrowers to repeatedly refinance their loans and pay additional points… and asset-based lending, where the loan is based not on the ability to repay but on the equity in one’s home.” Carolyn Bond and Richard Williams, “Residential Segregation and the Transformation of Home Mortgage Lending,” Social Forces 86, no. 2 (2007): 676–77.

97 Lei Ding et al., “Neighborhood Patterns of High-Cost Lending: The Case of Atlanta,” Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law 17, no. 3 (2008): 194.

98 Ibid.

99 The loan-to-value ratio is the percentage of the total value borrowed—the higher the percentage, the riskier the loan.

100 Demyanyk and Van Hemert, “Understanding the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” June 2011, 1849.

101 Ibid., 1852.

102 Purnanandam, “Originate-to-Distribute Model and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” 1881.

103 Smith, Wealth of Nations (V.i.e.32; 756).

104 Ibid. (V.i.e.33; 765).

105 For more on this transformation from lending to leverage, see Konings, Capital and Time.

106 Alford James, “Are Subprime Auto Loans Driving the next Financial Crisis?,” The Regulatory Review (2020), https://www.theregreview.org/2020/01/23/alford-subprime-auto-loans-driving-next-financial-crisis.; Billy Nauman, “Why America’s $1.3tn Car-Loan Market Cannot Avoid a Pile-Up,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/5a8ca5b1-9a1c-4f81-99a5-acecef75b389.

107 Ron Shevlin, “Debunking the Auto Loan Delinquency ‘Crisis,’” Forbes, February 21, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronshevlin/2019/02/21/debunking-the-auto-loan-delinquency-crisis/?sh=4af0864a12f.; Richard Reed, “Don’t Worry, There’s No Bubble in Subprime Auto Loans,” Business Insider, August 13, 2014, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-08/fears-of-a-subprime-auto-loan-bubble-are-overblown-for-now.

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Jennifer Corby

Jennifer Corby is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY, and holds a PhD in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research is principally concerned with the social production of time. More specifically, her work explores how sociopolitical institutions structure our perception of the past, present, future, and thus our political imaginaries, in service of revealing opportunities for transformative change. She is the editor of Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman (Terraform 2016); her current book project is Reclaiming Time: Freeing the Modern Subject.