Persona ficta? Social Figures, Property Subjects, and Investment Practices in the History of Financial Markets, 1950-1990

In contemporary historical debates on the "post-boom" era, the rise of digitized financial market capitalism is seen as an indication of a paradigmatic shift that marks the end of the Fordist order as a guiding social structure. This project critically examines the assumption of a "neoliberal" turning point and instead highlights the regionally specific social and cultural history of financialization through popular investment practices. It observes that this history is embedded in complex tensions between popularization and depersonalization, visibility and invisibility of financial capitalist ownership.

These tensions found expression in globally circulating social imaginaries - such as the concept of the "universal creditor" as an abstract, non-human, somehow uprooted persona ficta (Joseph Vogl), embodied by investors. These imaginary social figures served both to contest financial market capitalism and to depict markets as spaces of hope. The project considers the analysis of such representations as a means of probing the question of property oblivion and property obsession in modern societies, which guides the Collaborative Research Centre.

Increasing financialization poses significant challenges to the understanding of property relations in financial markets, not only for the general public but also for experts and political actors.

The associated media, discursive, and narrative construction of property subjects can be seen as a response, in part also as a counter-movement to these developments, which simultaneously could contribute to making financial property more visible and attractive to broader segments of society. This dynamic interaction did not begin in the 1970s but must be situated within the longer history of twentieth-century financial market capitalism, which is fundamentally characterized by tensions between state and market, subordination and liberalization.

The project will investigate these forms of construction on the basis of extensive historical sources, using interdisciplinary collaboration as well as methods from cultural, intellectual, and political history. It aims to make a significant contribution to the history of financialization after the Second World War. Europe, in particular West Germany - a region that was not initially at the forefront of financialization and was dominated by the narrative of a national "savings culture" - is the central focus. The West German case is particularly interesting because of the ways in which resistance to financial capitalist practices was framed, and the extent to which these constraints were overcome under the conditions of a post-dictatorial society. Asymmetrical comparisons with France will highlight the diversity of ownership practices within Western Europe and lay the groundwork for future research on the integration of (post)colonial spaces and the interconnected processes of decolonization and financialization.