The democratic method of obtaining capital—culture, governmentality and ethics of mass investment

The past thirty years have witnessed a range of complex changes in global and national political–economic landscapes. One of the most dramatic aspects of these changes is the “globalization” of finance capital. “Finance” is often said to be at the center of a new and globalizing set of financial spaces in which “everyday” actors are increasingly asked to participate. However, these developments are often depicted in the critical literature in epochal terms as political–economic configurations arising out of macro‐structural episodes of change. In contrast to these approaches, this paper argues for a “cultural economy” for finance as a way of both situating recent developments in a more specific and historically subtle manner and underscoring the ways in which “finance” is lived and constituted at a “minor” or everyday level. By assessing the advertising initiatives of three campaigns of “mass investment” from earlier moments of the twentieth century, this paper foregrounds some of the contexts out of and against which neo‐liberal modes of globalized finance arise, concluding that more historically‐situated accounts could lead to more contingent, and hence, contestable analyses of “global finance”.