The financialisation of the citizen: Social and financial inclusion through european private law Guido Comparato, Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2018. 232 pp. £70, ISBN 978‐1‐5099‐1922‐2

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/iir.1332
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Date: 01 March 2019
• Author: Jan‐Ocko Heuer

BOOK REVIEW

THE FINANCIALISATION OF THE CITIZEN:

SOCIAL AND FINANCIAL INCLUSION

THROUGH EUROPEAN PRIVATE LAW

Guido Comparato

Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2018. 232 pp. £70, ISBN 978‐1‐5099‐1922‐2

Guido Comparato, now a lecturer in law at Birkbeck, University of London, has written this

monograph as part of a research project on European regulatory private law that was funded

by the European Research Council and led by Professor Hans‐W. Micklitz at the European

University Institute in Florence from 2011 to 2016. The project suggested that a self‐sufficient

private legal order at the European Union (EU) level with a strongly regulatory character is

emerging, and this book focuses on the subject of retail financial services and examines if the

traditional rules and principles of private law are (still) adequate to produce the policy goals

of financial and social inclusion of citizens in the financialised political economy of the

European Union.

The book's starting point is the diagnosis that certain financial services—such as a bank

account or access to credit—have not only an economic and legal dimension but also a social

and political one, because these services have become so essential in contemporary societies that

exclusion from them seriously limits social participation and might result in economic

marginalisation and social exclusion. Put more pointedly, access to basic financial services

has become part and parcel of citizenry. Yet, this “financialisation of the citizen”comes in dif-

ferent historical and geographical variants: When originating in the early twentieth‐century

United States (US), access to financial resources was supposed to reconcile individual welfare,

economic growth, and social mobility and thus praised as “democratisation of finance”;by

contrast, about a century later—and in light of welfare state retrenchment and privatisation

of public services—its contemporary European variant places more emphasis on the prevention

of poverty and is more cautiously termed “financial inclusion.”

The latter development raises the question if European private law—broadly understood and

including EU private law and national private laws—can produce the policy goals of financial

and social inclusion, considering that the fundamental principles and rules of private law are

inspired by different considerations and rooted in earlier socio‐economic contexts. In order to

answer this question, the study moves from the overall political economy of financial and social

inclusion (Chapter 1) to its treatment in policy documents at the EU level (Chapter 2) and

finally to European legal rules on four specific areas of financial inclusion: access to a bank

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© 2019 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

DOI: 10.1002/iir.1332

126 Int Insolv Rev. 2019;28:126–128.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/iir