Description
There is a growing and influential literature on the financialisation of the state that foregrounds the state as an object of financialisation, examining how its institutions are restructured in line with financial logics and markets. This article contributes to that body of work by turning the analytical gaze inwards, exploring the state’s changing treatment of its own public institutions as a distinctive mode of governance. I conceptualise this as authoritative financialisation to describe how the state governs public goods through debt – and the implications of this shift. Focusing on the transformation of university funding in England, particularly the 2012 reforms, the article argues that financialisation is not merely a mechanism of privatisation or financial market expansion, but a means through which the state exerts fiscal control and enforces discipline. The use of loans to fund public goods can be understood as a mechanism of governance in which debt operates as a tool that disciplines acceptance of the state’s undeniable power in the subjugation and exploitation of the labour required to repay that debt. Authoritative financialisation describes a new form of control which enables the state to manage economic risk, shift financial burden onto individuals, and consolidate regulatory authority.
