The rise of crowdfunding and P2P finance in the 21st century has been driven in part by its public promise to facilitate the democratization of finance. At the same time, and in a radically different direction, we have seen a massive concentration of the power over wealth in the mainstream finance industry. As described in Chapter One, we see this concentration as resembling Hobbes's figure of Leviathan in the scale of its influence and reach over our lives.

The growth of this new financial Leviathan, and the redrawing of the social contract by which we negotiate our individual and collective well-being, has occurred at the same time as a widespread collapse in trust – in the state, in democracy and in finance itself. This collapse has placed responsibilities for managing the various trials of daily life increasingly onto already burdened individual shoulders, both in terms of the here and now and in making sufficient provision for later life. In turn, as trust has been lost in the capability of our institutions to protect and provide for us, individuals have chosen to place their trust – that is, their money – into the financial Leviathan, without whose benevolent protection they would be forced to face the future war of all against all from the position of a life that is ‘nasty, precarious, and skint’ (to misquote Hobbes).

In these times of rapid change and uncertainty, we have thus become beholden to a decreasing number of companies who we are empowering to make decisions that affect much of the world's wealth and how it is used. In handing over our trust in the form of our money, professional financiers can command significant fees based on the power they wield. Those fees not only reflect the market power that the finance industry commands, but also its political power. Timely, then, that we should consider whether such a situation is healthy for our democracies and the long-standing principles and values that underpin them.

The question of who controls money, and so the best system for ensuring that its benefits outweigh its costs and risks, is one which has been asked by philosophers, historians and the writers of theatrical comedies since ancient times. Telling the story of that history is the main purpose of this chapter.