In its most recent intensification, the financial crisis has led to an unmistakable crisis of governance, to emergency politics in the gray zone between economics and politics: The business of governing has been taken over by committees of experts, improvised bodies and "troikas" whose Legitimacy is the exception.
However, this development is by no means new. As Joseph Vogl shows in his new book, the dynamics of the capitalist system and financial capitalism are characterized by a co-evolution of states and markets in which interdependencies are established and reinforced. From the early modern treasury onward, sovereignty reservations of their own order emerge, operating autonomously within the practice of government and determining the destinies of our societies in the interest of private wealth preservation: as an unnamed Fourth Estate within the state. The current dominance of financial markets is thus understood as the latest variety of an economization of governance, in which the intertwining of the exercise of power and the accumulation of capital generates informal "sovereignty effects." "Joseph Vogl takes an original and insightful look at transnational power structures, and his account is convincing. In the very first pages, the grave word of Coup d'état is dropped. But maybe we are just not used to the open word anymore" (titel-kulturmagazin.net).
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VOGL, Joseph, 2015. Der Souveränitätseffekt. Zürich Berlin: diaphanes. ISBN 978-3-03734-250-3.