Framing John Law G(u)ilt, Fiction, and Finance

In this chapter I scrutinize a historic link between finance and fiction that potentially impedes moral commerce, while at the same time exposing the moral implications of commerce where finance and the market are concerned. In order to do so I will draw attention to the foundations of modern commerce, and discuss a shift in economic thinking that began—in the English context—roughly in 1688, and slightly later or earlier elsewhere in western Europe. This shift, to which Dickson (1967), North and Weingast (1989), and many others since have referred to as ‘the financial revolution’, did much to reshape society and had a profound impact on human relations. Following this so-called revolution, commerce became—and continues to be—increasingly dependent on finance, and this shift in the focus of national economies is key to moral or ethical understandings of the impact that profit-making engagement with the market may have on more or less remote others.