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The basic premise of The Age of Catastrophe is that ‘the Bolshevik reign of terror was more than just a reaction to the extremely difficult situation in early 1918 both inside Russia and beyond, for it necessarily resulted from Lenin’s plan to create a new communist society within a backward countr…

The reality that Britain was already a world power in 1914 also apparently raises no problem; Germany’s ambition to become one was the intolerable cause of the war. As David Calleo long ago pointed out, the boot was if anything on the other foot. Britain’s overweening global status made any steady …

[...] Nor do we for a moment intend that investigation of the performativity or counterperformativity of mathematical models should displace other forms of analysis of finance. For instance, the rise of options and other forms of derivatives cannot be understood in isolation from broader processes …

In a stimulating contribution to the literature on performativity in economic life, Elena Esposito points to the pervasiveness of what, drawing upon the social theory of Niklas Luhmann, she calls ‘second-order observation’. Translated into our terms, it is not simply that mathematical models in fin…

[...] our argument—our claim of counterperformativity—is that those assumptions made possible, via their gaming by market participants, the construction of securities that radically undermined them.