This chapter examines how the digital financial infrastructure that emerged in the wake of the 2008 GFC assisted to address the financial, economic, and health challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. While the 2008 Crisis was a financial crisis that impacted the real economy, COVID-19 was a health and geopolitical crisis that impacted the real economy. In fact, during COVID-19 the financial system turned from problem child to crisis manager, having provided effective tools to support the crisis response. Notwithstanding the former, digital finance has also created new forms of risk (TechRisk).

Chapter 3 analyzes the party-political legacies fueling the contestation of economic liberalization. Because of France’s dirigiste past, it is not just the left that is ambivalent toward economic liberalization, but also the right. The French right was in power during the heyday of the dirigiste system, so statist and nationalist principles became central to its economic outlook. In addition, leaders of the right emerged from the upheaval of May 1968 upheaval with a deep fear of strikes and protests. Finally, much like the left, the right never developed a legitimating discourse for economic liberalization, instead blaming it on external forces, notably European integration. Because of these legacies, the right has been an inconsistent backer of economic liberalization. Chapter 3 describes several characteristic behaviors of the right that foster the contestation of economic liberalization both in the streets and within governing circles: (1) a nationalist understanding of the economy that leads to extensive intervention to prevent foreign takeovers of French companies; (2) a fear of social upheaval that inclines conservative governments to retreat from reforms in the face of strikes and demonstrations, thereby encouraging further protests; (3) a fair-weather liberalism that gives way to statist revival in times of economic crisis.

In the book’s afterword, I suggest that the period studied in this book has drawn to a close, as literary liberals have become both less interested in responding to postmodernism and more interested in rejecting free-market politics, including the centrist, communitarian version of this politics. To illustrate this shift, I compare texts published on either side of the 2008 financial crisis. In Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris experiments with a collective first-person narrator in order to dramatize the tensions of office life, tensions which he figures in terms of the oppositions between elitism and egalitarianism and between sincerity and irony. Ferris’s self-reflexive interest in forging empathetic connections between workers, bosses, readers, and writers makes his novel a quintessential post-postmodern text. Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009) by contrast, are precisely the kind of “angry” books “about work” that Ferris rejects. In formally distinct ways, both novels offer a political vision skeptical of centrism and committed to the irreducibility of class as a source of political and economic conflict.