The Master's Tools

About The Master’s Tools

Democratic control can make finance a tool to express and carry out the will of the people

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? Most political commentators point to heads of state, such as the Presidency, and other formal institutions of the state.

But in The Master’s Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer lays elsewhere, in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of democratic ruptures that argues that democracy is deeply intertwined with the economy itself.

He shows how democracy can be deepened and working-class power strengthened by creating new sortition-based institutions of deliberative finance. His radical proposal, the first of its kind, offers practical steps toward a comprehensive design to create the investment mandates that are needed to fund a just green transition, social housing, and other socially necessary, but privately underfunded, public goods.