Brockhouse Cooper

Review by John Shingler: Lords of Finance

Liaquat Ahamed. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, New York. Penguin Press, 2008. 564 pp. $32.95.

The key to understanding Ahamed’s excellent book is to recognize that its leitmotiv is that history is best seen as a succession of decisions taken by leading actors; it is not a process subject to impersonal forces that impel individuals and groups ineluctably in one direction or another. The essence of this world view is captured in the epigraph to Lords of Finance, “Read no history – nothing but biography, for that is life without theory”, a provocative aphorism taken from Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming.   I think many people, however much they may claim to subscribe to some theory, whether it be dialectical materialism or the efficient market hypothesis, in practice basically agree with Ahamed’s proposition that leadership does indeed matter.  Why else the fierce competition for office and for control of governments or corporate bodies or political parties?

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