Robert L Meister
· Professor of Social and Political ThoughtUniversity of California, Santa Cruz · History of Science
Active 1963–2025
About
Robert L Meister is a Professor of Social and Political Thought in the Division of Humanities at UC Santa Cruz, affiliated with the History of Consciousness Department. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, obtained in 1976. His research concerns the moral relations between the beneficiaries of social and political injustice and its victims, with a focus on political and moral philosophy, law and social theory, Marxian theory, institutional analysis, and anti-discrimination law. Meister's notable publications include 'After Evil' (2011), which critiques the global discourse of humanitarianism following the fall of Communism in 1989, and 'The Wealth of Societies' (2015), which discusses the global discourse of financialization and the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. His earlier work has engaged with Marxist analysis, the politics of recognition, political theology, US and comparative constitutional law, and legal theory.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Computer Science
- Law
- World Wide Web
- Economics
- Finance
- History
- Art history
- Criminology
- Neoclassical economics
- Library science
Selected publications
Political Theory · 2025-05-21
article1st authorCorresponding13 CONFESSIONS OF AN ACCUSED CONSPIRACY THEORIST / THE FINANCIALIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION
2024-02-15 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingConfessions of an Accused Conspiracy Theorist
2023-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIn 2010 the author of this chapter was accused of "conspiracy theory" for exposing the University of California's (UC)'s long-term strategy to pledge revenues from higher enrollments and tuition increases for general purpose bonds to fund construction outside its core educational mission. Even after UC's financial strategy was documented online, the university denied that this explained its conduct during the financial crisis. The chapter shows how and why such deniability was part of its strategy. At stake is the conversion of the university’s mission from education to finance, which explains the explosion of student debt in recent years. The chapter also considers the political and personal effects of being accused of conspiracy theory in a moment of unannounced financial restructuring of higher education.
CONFESSIONS OF AN ACCUSED CONSPIRACY THEORIST:
2023-12-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingJustice Is an Option: A Democratic Theory of Finance for the Twenty-First Century
2021 · 38 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- Economics
2020 · 33 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Criminology
More than ten years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the financial sector is thriving. But something is deeply wrong. Taxpayers bore the burden of bailing out “too big to fail” banks, but got nothing in return. Inequality has soared, and a populist backlash against elites has shaken the foundations of our political order. Meanwhile, financial capitalism seems more entrenched than ever. What is the left to do? Justice Is an Option uses those problems—and the framework of finance that created them—to reimagine historical justice. Robert Meister returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance. Instead of closing our eyes to the political and economic realities of our era, we need to grapple with them head-on. Meister does just that, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality. Meister here formulates nothing less than a democratic financial theory for the twenty-first century—one that is equally conversant in political philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Justice Is an Option is a radical, invigorating first page of a new—and sorely needed—leftist playbook.
Critical Historical Studies · 2020 · 2 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Library science
2019-12-31
article1st authorCorrespondingSocial Text · 2019-12-01 · 21 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingThe article develops political implications of the late Randy Martin’s idea of “derivative sociality” as the real subsumption of human life under the option form. The option form, beginning with the hedge, allows realized surplus value to be preserved (locked in) and eventually accumulated by securing its convertibility back into money—its “liquidity.” The opposite, financial illiquidity is capital disaccumulation in Marx’s sense. It follows that the acceptability of capital accumulation depends on making financial market illiquidity politically unimaginable. This limitation on political imagination can, however, be largely overcome in the spirit of Marx (and Randy Martin) by using the conceptual resources of options theory itself. In options theory, for example, privately produced financial derivatives are priced as though a component of them is synthetic public debt (“risk-free”). But this can be true only because in crisis scenarios the government guarantees to swap its own debt for synthetic equivalents to it at par. However, such guarantees are themselves options that can be priced. That price in 2008, the “liquidity premium,” has been calculated by leading financial economists to be trillions of dollars. This is equivalent to the premium that a justice-seeking democracy could have extracted for wiping out the cumulative effects of capital accumulation, had doing so been understood as a political option that could be rolled over for a price. The goal of this article is to identify financial market liquidity as a political choke point in today’s capitalism so as to focus political attention on reversing the cumulative effect of capital markets in compounding historical injustices.
Reinventing Marx for an Age of Finance
Postmodern Culture · 2017-01-01 · 4 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingThis essay accounts for the production of specifically financial products such as hedges, focusing on how and why their liquidity adds value through a critical re-reading of Marx’s account of relative surplus value in the production of commodities. It then considers the political implications of its restatement of Marx’s view of capitalism, arguing that a political price should be exacted for rolling over the option of historical justice in the sense of sudden disaccumulation by issuing a government-backed liquidity guarantee (or “put”). Although economists have calculated the price of a systemic liquidity put as a liability of government--which becomes very high at moments like 2008--they do not take into account forms of political action that increase uncertainty about whether government will provide the guarantee, and in what form, if any, it will demand to be repaid. The essay seeks to pose this last, ultimately political, question about the financialization of capitalism.
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
P. Föhn
- 4 shared
Edmund Beck
- 4 shared
Camille Jaccard
University of Lausanne
- 4 shared
H.-J. Etter
- 4 shared
S. Gliott
- 2 shared
Cornelia Gălătescu
- 2 shared
Octavia Roman
- 2 shared
Daniela Todor
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