Carolyn Biltoft | Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva (original) (raw)

Papers by Carolyn Biltoft

History and Theory, Mar 30, 2022

This essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, whi... more This essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, which unfolds a philosophy of history for contemporary "financial times." I turn first to Samman's concept of the strange loops of financial history, and so to the historical turn initiated by the subprime crisis of 2008. Then, I add the concept of strange portraiture to Samman's idea of strange history. Borrowing a metaphor from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, I trace the oscillating appearance of the linked faces of homo historia and homo economicus, which each offer distinct explanatory frameworks "under the sign of finance." In this way, I suggest that we can also observe how capitalism transformed the meaning and possible trajectories of something like fate from invented origins to imagined destinies. In that frame, I explore how the loops that Samman underscores are also bound to the ways in which history and economics have competed and continue to compete for ascendency as modern sense-making epistemes with different time-binding effects.

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

This essay explores the historical process by which the birth and expansion of information system... more This essay explores the historical process by which the birth and expansion of information systems transformed the relationship between “faith” and “fact.” The existence of recurring forms of credulity and conversely denial—from holocaust denial to climate change denial—suggests that patterns of belief and disbelief will not be easily resolved either with fact-checking or with the regulation of the press. While such approaches see the problem of misinformation in terms of a contest between truth and falsehood, history suggests that people believe falsehoods, because they need to for a variety of psychological or socio-cultural reasons. While understanding what “needs” falsehoods meet may not provide an immediate solution to the problem of misinformation, it does open a different perspective on the question. In the end, the essay suggests that the current trend towards STEM education, to the growing exclusion of the humanities, may be slowly undermining the very analytical skills the public needs to be able to counter the tides of misinformation.

Finance and society, Mar 22, 2023

In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin... more In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin stories, which lead to different understandings of his nature (Thornton, 2018). In Hesiod, Eros was a primordial god, the fourth to come into existence, trailing on the heels of Chaos, Gaia (the earth), and Tartarus (the abyss). In other tales, he was born of the illicit coupling of Aphrodite and Ares. Beyond these, adaptations of the myth (including Roman ones) are as numerous and heterogenous as the forms that love can take. It was with Plato, however, that Eros became a figure of political economy. In the Symposium, a new version unfolded in a dialog between Socrates and Diotima of Mantinea. Therein, the infant Eros was conceived during another unblessed union; this time a tryst between the goddess of Poverty (Penia) and that of Wealth or Resource (Plutos). With this parentage, love and desire became allegorically wed to the problem of material lack and abundance. Scholars have long debated the message Plato intended to send with this altered theogony (Calame, 1999). Of greatest relevance here are those interpretations that place the myth's retelling inside the fuller Platonic canon of ethics and politics. In this paradigm, Eros' maternal lineage (poverty) doesn't constitute a condition (lack), but rather, stands as an ethical choice (self-abnegation). All individual yearnings submit to the needs of the whole. This chosen poverty also leads Eros to the transcendental element in his paternal heritage (wealth). Resources get allocated according to the principles of order, justice, brotherly love, and filial piety (Lamascus, 2016). Plato would allow this Eros, the modest, civic-minded deity, to stay inside the walls of the City, as he evicted those less redeemable, more Dionysian figures: the poets (Cornelli and Lisi, 2010). Plato's root concern here-how to square individual desire with communal welfare-has returned as a source of often-rancorous debates in the history of economic thought. I want to suggest that we can re-read orthodox and heterodox texts in the economic canon as offering competing theogonies of Eros. More pointedly, we can see the mythological subtexts and blind spots of those paradigms whenever they define or model the nature of human desire. Such readings, however, work best in a poetic register. Because this essay can only be a fragment, I'll begin by focusing on the theories that plot Eros as Self-Interest. Like Plato, such theories saw reason as key to tempering wilder, primeval desires. The birth of Self-Interest also shares a parentage with the Platonic Eros, namely, the

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Oct 28, 2016

The League of Nations may seem a peculiar entry in a volume dedicated to heterodoxy. The organiza... more The League of Nations may seem a peculiar entry in a volume dedicated to heterodoxy. The organization emerged from the Paris Peace Conference as a manifestation of, or an international advertisement for, the braided faiths of classical economics and liberalism. The League’s paper trail certainly contains claims that the rule of law and free trade based on comparative advantage could together secure peace by assuring the greatest good and wealth for the greatest number. Yet, even though the League was born within a lineage of orthodoxy, it also provided an arena for discussing alternatives to classical liberalism. As the world’s first permanent intergovernmental forum of its kind, the League gathered and brought into conversation a host of different nations and interest groups. Whatever its initial intentions, it gradually became a zone where the claims of convergence continually and publically ran up against political and economic divergences. Thus, the League piloted the working through of a question that continues to afflict multilateral institutions: should these bodies reflect or actively alter or redress the distribution of power and resources on the global stage? It was in grappling with, though not resolving, this question that the League both reasserted and then slowly came to re-evaluate some of its founding precepts, especially in the economic domain. This chapter claims that beyond the narratives of success and failure, international organizations provide a historical laboratory for studying the ligaments connecting the international division of labor to the international balance of power. Furthermore, they provide a glimpse into the ways in which struggles to either preserve or restructure those ligaments often played out equally in the realm of ideology as in the realm of policy. To those ends, the following pages will first address how the League’s efforts to promote the values of classical liberalism shed light on some of the fault lines of those doctrines. Secondly, the chapter will explore how the League weighed promises of laissez-faire’s long-run prosperity against counterclaims that social and political dissatisfaction with gaps in wealth and power could undermine international stability in the short run. Finally, it will focus on how the League’s open discussions of wealth distribution helped to incubate the seeds of alternative trade and development theory after 1929

Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, Jul 7, 2023

del lenguaje resituando la organización en los contextos geopolíticos y filosóficos de largo plaz... more del lenguaje resituando la organización en los contextos geopolíticos y filosóficos de largo plazo del llamado «giro lingüístico». Al mismo tiempo, el artículo argumenta que observando en detalle incluso las cuestiones de lenguaje más peculiares que se le plantearon a la Liga, podemos ver vínculos profundos y a menudo tecnológicamente impulsados entre las transformaciones en los dominios de la filosofía y la lingüística y las estrategias políticas nacientes en el escenario mundial. Ambos reflejaron un cambio conceptual hacia la idea de que las palabras constriñeron, moldearon, o incluso alteraron la «realidad».

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations... more The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements—by aiming to create a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on justice. As part of these efforts, a veritable army of League personnel set out to shape “global public opinion,” in favor of the postwar liberal international order. Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace reopens the archives of the League to reveal surprising links between the political use of modern information systems and the rise of mass violence in the interwar world. Historian Carolyn N. Biltoft shows how conflicts over truth and power that played out at the League of Nations offer broader insights into the deeper nature of totalitarian regimes, which used media flows to demonize a whole range of “others.” A meditation on instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global and violent modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.

Capitalism, 2020

This paper asks what we might learn about the “grammatical structures” of capitalism by “reading”... more This paper asks what we might learn about the “grammatical structures” of capitalism by “reading” the balance sheets of nonprofit organizations. To those ends, it turns to the appraisal and liquidation of the League of Nations’ assets at the time of the organization’s dissolution in 1946. Rather than describing the whole process, the paper narrows in on the liquidation board’s decision to price a valuable collection of gifts and historical objects as zero in the final financial calculation. Drawing on theories of gifts and symbolic exchange, the paper asks what the history of that non-price tells us more broadly about the pecuniary role of what accountants call goodwill not only in the workings of international organizations, but also in relation to both the tangible and intangible nature of modern capital itself.

Journal of World History, 2020

Using the situated vantage point of the League of Nations, this article explores how fusing the t... more Using the situated vantage point of the League of Nations, this article explores how fusing the tools of world and institutional history offers generative methods for writing multiple “decentered” histories. First, it suggests approaching organizations as sites embedded in and so reflective of the structures of a particular world historical conjuncture. Then, it argues that we can make use of the ample and even mundane materials in organizational archives to rethink and retell standard historical narrative arcs.

Capitalism, 2019

This paper thinks critically about the economics and politics of academic review practices. It po... more This paper thinks critically about the economics and politics of academic review practices. It ponders what it might mean to think of the "art" of review beyond the effort to preserve and protect academic "property rights."

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

In the 1926 essay, “The End of Laissez-Faire,” J.M Keynes used the giraffe as a metaphor of both ... more In the 1926 essay, “The End of Laissez-Faire,” J.M Keynes used the giraffe as a metaphor of both welfare and herd dynamics, in order to argue for the importance of wise government intercession into markets. This article conducts a close textual analysis of that essay, demonstrating how Keynes’ own choice of metaphor reveals the economist’s deeper seated, even latent imperial preferences and pre-commitments. In the end, it argues, Keynes’ idea of national welfare depended on a world where Britain maintained a vast multinational empire.

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

History and Theory, Mar 30, 2022

This essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, whi... more This essay engages with Amin Samman's incisive 2019 text, History in Financial Times, which unfolds a philosophy of history for contemporary "financial times." I turn first to Samman's concept of the strange loops of financial history, and so to the historical turn initiated by the subprime crisis of 2008. Then, I add the concept of strange portraiture to Samman's idea of strange history. Borrowing a metaphor from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, I trace the oscillating appearance of the linked faces of homo historia and homo economicus, which each offer distinct explanatory frameworks "under the sign of finance." In this way, I suggest that we can also observe how capitalism transformed the meaning and possible trajectories of something like fate from invented origins to imagined destinies. In that frame, I explore how the loops that Samman underscores are also bound to the ways in which history and economics have competed and continue to compete for ascendency as modern sense-making epistemes with different time-binding effects.

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

This essay explores the historical process by which the birth and expansion of information system... more This essay explores the historical process by which the birth and expansion of information systems transformed the relationship between “faith” and “fact.” The existence of recurring forms of credulity and conversely denial—from holocaust denial to climate change denial—suggests that patterns of belief and disbelief will not be easily resolved either with fact-checking or with the regulation of the press. While such approaches see the problem of misinformation in terms of a contest between truth and falsehood, history suggests that people believe falsehoods, because they need to for a variety of psychological or socio-cultural reasons. While understanding what “needs” falsehoods meet may not provide an immediate solution to the problem of misinformation, it does open a different perspective on the question. In the end, the essay suggests that the current trend towards STEM education, to the growing exclusion of the humanities, may be slowly undermining the very analytical skills the public needs to be able to counter the tides of misinformation.

Finance and society, Mar 22, 2023

In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin... more In Greek archaic literature and philosophy, Eros, the god of love and desire, has numerous origin stories, which lead to different understandings of his nature (Thornton, 2018). In Hesiod, Eros was a primordial god, the fourth to come into existence, trailing on the heels of Chaos, Gaia (the earth), and Tartarus (the abyss). In other tales, he was born of the illicit coupling of Aphrodite and Ares. Beyond these, adaptations of the myth (including Roman ones) are as numerous and heterogenous as the forms that love can take. It was with Plato, however, that Eros became a figure of political economy. In the Symposium, a new version unfolded in a dialog between Socrates and Diotima of Mantinea. Therein, the infant Eros was conceived during another unblessed union; this time a tryst between the goddess of Poverty (Penia) and that of Wealth or Resource (Plutos). With this parentage, love and desire became allegorically wed to the problem of material lack and abundance. Scholars have long debated the message Plato intended to send with this altered theogony (Calame, 1999). Of greatest relevance here are those interpretations that place the myth's retelling inside the fuller Platonic canon of ethics and politics. In this paradigm, Eros' maternal lineage (poverty) doesn't constitute a condition (lack), but rather, stands as an ethical choice (self-abnegation). All individual yearnings submit to the needs of the whole. This chosen poverty also leads Eros to the transcendental element in his paternal heritage (wealth). Resources get allocated according to the principles of order, justice, brotherly love, and filial piety (Lamascus, 2016). Plato would allow this Eros, the modest, civic-minded deity, to stay inside the walls of the City, as he evicted those less redeemable, more Dionysian figures: the poets (Cornelli and Lisi, 2010). Plato's root concern here-how to square individual desire with communal welfare-has returned as a source of often-rancorous debates in the history of economic thought. I want to suggest that we can re-read orthodox and heterodox texts in the economic canon as offering competing theogonies of Eros. More pointedly, we can see the mythological subtexts and blind spots of those paradigms whenever they define or model the nature of human desire. Such readings, however, work best in a poetic register. Because this essay can only be a fragment, I'll begin by focusing on the theories that plot Eros as Self-Interest. Like Plato, such theories saw reason as key to tempering wilder, primeval desires. The birth of Self-Interest also shares a parentage with the Platonic Eros, namely, the

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Oct 28, 2016

The League of Nations may seem a peculiar entry in a volume dedicated to heterodoxy. The organiza... more The League of Nations may seem a peculiar entry in a volume dedicated to heterodoxy. The organization emerged from the Paris Peace Conference as a manifestation of, or an international advertisement for, the braided faiths of classical economics and liberalism. The League’s paper trail certainly contains claims that the rule of law and free trade based on comparative advantage could together secure peace by assuring the greatest good and wealth for the greatest number. Yet, even though the League was born within a lineage of orthodoxy, it also provided an arena for discussing alternatives to classical liberalism. As the world’s first permanent intergovernmental forum of its kind, the League gathered and brought into conversation a host of different nations and interest groups. Whatever its initial intentions, it gradually became a zone where the claims of convergence continually and publically ran up against political and economic divergences. Thus, the League piloted the working through of a question that continues to afflict multilateral institutions: should these bodies reflect or actively alter or redress the distribution of power and resources on the global stage? It was in grappling with, though not resolving, this question that the League both reasserted and then slowly came to re-evaluate some of its founding precepts, especially in the economic domain. This chapter claims that beyond the narratives of success and failure, international organizations provide a historical laboratory for studying the ligaments connecting the international division of labor to the international balance of power. Furthermore, they provide a glimpse into the ways in which struggles to either preserve or restructure those ligaments often played out equally in the realm of ideology as in the realm of policy. To those ends, the following pages will first address how the League’s efforts to promote the values of classical liberalism shed light on some of the fault lines of those doctrines. Secondly, the chapter will explore how the League weighed promises of laissez-faire’s long-run prosperity against counterclaims that social and political dissatisfaction with gaps in wealth and power could undermine international stability in the short run. Finally, it will focus on how the League’s open discussions of wealth distribution helped to incubate the seeds of alternative trade and development theory after 1929

Ayer. Revista de Historia Contemporánea, Jul 7, 2023

del lenguaje resituando la organización en los contextos geopolíticos y filosóficos de largo plaz... more del lenguaje resituando la organización en los contextos geopolíticos y filosóficos de largo plazo del llamado «giro lingüístico». Al mismo tiempo, el artículo argumenta que observando en detalle incluso las cuestiones de lenguaje más peculiares que se le plantearon a la Liga, podemos ver vínculos profundos y a menudo tecnológicamente impulsados entre las transformaciones en los dominios de la filosofía y la lingüística y las estrategias políticas nacientes en el escenario mundial. Ambos reflejaron un cambio conceptual hacia la idea de que las palabras constriñeron, moldearon, o incluso alteraron la «realidad».

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations... more The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements—by aiming to create a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on justice. As part of these efforts, a veritable army of League personnel set out to shape “global public opinion,” in favor of the postwar liberal international order. Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace reopens the archives of the League to reveal surprising links between the political use of modern information systems and the rise of mass violence in the interwar world. Historian Carolyn N. Biltoft shows how conflicts over truth and power that played out at the League of Nations offer broader insights into the deeper nature of totalitarian regimes, which used media flows to demonize a whole range of “others.” A meditation on instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global and violent modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.

Capitalism, 2020

This paper asks what we might learn about the “grammatical structures” of capitalism by “reading”... more This paper asks what we might learn about the “grammatical structures” of capitalism by “reading” the balance sheets of nonprofit organizations. To those ends, it turns to the appraisal and liquidation of the League of Nations’ assets at the time of the organization’s dissolution in 1946. Rather than describing the whole process, the paper narrows in on the liquidation board’s decision to price a valuable collection of gifts and historical objects as zero in the final financial calculation. Drawing on theories of gifts and symbolic exchange, the paper asks what the history of that non-price tells us more broadly about the pecuniary role of what accountants call goodwill not only in the workings of international organizations, but also in relation to both the tangible and intangible nature of modern capital itself.

Journal of World History, 2020

Using the situated vantage point of the League of Nations, this article explores how fusing the t... more Using the situated vantage point of the League of Nations, this article explores how fusing the tools of world and institutional history offers generative methods for writing multiple “decentered” histories. First, it suggests approaching organizations as sites embedded in and so reflective of the structures of a particular world historical conjuncture. Then, it argues that we can make use of the ample and even mundane materials in organizational archives to rethink and retell standard historical narrative arcs.

Capitalism, 2019

This paper thinks critically about the economics and politics of academic review practices. It po... more This paper thinks critically about the economics and politics of academic review practices. It ponders what it might mean to think of the "art" of review beyond the effort to preserve and protect academic "property rights."

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

In the 1926 essay, “The End of Laissez-Faire,” J.M Keynes used the giraffe as a metaphor of both ... more In the 1926 essay, “The End of Laissez-Faire,” J.M Keynes used the giraffe as a metaphor of both welfare and herd dynamics, in order to argue for the importance of wise government intercession into markets. This article conducts a close textual analysis of that essay, demonstrating how Keynes’ own choice of metaphor reveals the economist’s deeper seated, even latent imperial preferences and pre-commitments. In the end, it argues, Keynes’ idea of national welfare depended on a world where Britain maintained a vast multinational empire.

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

University of Chicago Press eBooks, 2021

University of Chicago Press , 2021

The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations... more The newly born League of Nations confronted the post-WWI world—from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements—by aiming to create a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on justice. As part of these efforts, a veritable army of League personnel set out to shape “global public opinion,” in favor of the postwar liberal international order. Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace reopens the archives of the League to reveal surprising links between the political use of modern information systems and the rise of mass violence in the interwar world. Historian Carolyn N. Biltoft shows how conflicts over truth and power that played out at the League of Nations offer broader insights into the deeper nature of totalitarian regimes, which used media flows to demonize a whole range of “others.”

A meditation on instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global and violent modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information—and all its attendant problems.