Visions of Financial Order cannot have been an easy book to write. The subject is highly technical and the scope is ambitious, covering the transformation of banking regulation in three countries (United States, Canada, Spain), over the course of nearly two and a half centuries. But that short summary does not convey the complexity of having to manage such wide-ranging temporal and spatial comparisons while simultaneously attempting to deliver one single, forceful, and persuasive narrative about culture and institutional dynamics. And yet Kim Pernell succeeds at both tasks, with great rigor and elegance.

The core argument of the book is the idea of “conflicting political orders.” Pernell takes from her adviser, Frank Dobbin, the notion that a nation’s economic policies must be understood in reference to its political culture—and more specifically, to the principles of political order that this particular society has committed itself to in the course of its history. Note that these principles are not fixed nor foreordained nor even single. Rather, they exist as constellations of ideas—well, mostly two ideas—that sometimes cohere and sometimes oppose each other, and whose relationship and substance evolves over time. For instance, in the United States, sometimes the principle of order by community sovereignty and the principle of order by competition are aligned, and sometimes they aren’t. But somehow these two ideas became inscribed in the country’s political DNA, and they keep getting called up and wrestled with at critical historical junctures. The joint reverence for competition and community informed what people cared about when they started designing modern economic institutions, and it continued to inform their appreciation of what had to be changed about those institutions as they were tested, again and again. This is because their vision of how the economy should be organized is inspired, in some vague but powerful manner, by how they imagine their polity works and what makes it successful.

The implications of this thesis are immense. In Frank Dobbin’sFootnote ¹ analysis, cultural principles of political order help to explain variations in industrial policy. The United States, Britain, and France all built railroad networks around the same period, but they planned and governed them very differently. In my own book on those same three nations,Footnote ² I showed that the science and practice of economics arose in all of them, too, but that the structure and preoccupations of the field varied enormously—again because economists from different countries did not quite see eye to eye when it came to identifying what was worth studying, how it was worth studying, and how it mattered in practice.

In the subject that preoccupies Pernell—banking regulation—the United States, Canada and Spain all went through the same historical motions and a stable, organized, financial sector emerged and expanded in all three countries. They all began chartering banks in the nineteenth century, realized they needed to regulate them in the early 20th, created national supervisory institutions, revised their regulatory model after the devastating financial crises of the 1920s and 1930s, started questioning the revision with the resurgence of inflation in the 1960s and 1970s, until competing principles fully reasserted themselves in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing each regime almost full circle toward its cultural origins, until the wheel started to turn again in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

The shifts were, by and large, similar, driven by developments in the macroeconomy, international frameworks and accounting rules (Basel), and financial innovation. But the implementations of economic order were very different. Policy elites in those nations generally worried about different pitfalls. Within each nation, they had different priorities and interests to juggle. Most importantly, they perceived and judged success according to very different standards. Nobody taught these people explicitly to think in these idiosyncratic ways, but they absorbed the “dominant” and “latent” frames all the same. There was a useful and readily available repertoire, to use Ann Swidler’s concept, for them to reach for, however confusedly, to make decisions. That’s why the title—Visions of Financial Order—is so appropriate. Nothing less than visions, but also nothing more.

What Pernell adds to this generally Dobbinian approach is an explicit principle of historical motion. That principle lies in the dialectical, almost Hegelian, set up: in her story, each regulatory regime more or less engenders its successor by producing its own contradictions and failures. It is the tension between two competing principles of political order within each nation—again, not the same two principles across nations—that propels regulatory change forward, by offering a culturally accessible frame not only for a critique of the present regime, but also for imagining and justifying an alternative. For instance, in the decades prior to the financial crisis of 2008, regulators’ efforts to stabilize their financial system pushed them to shift their emphasis from one principle of order to another. In the United States, regulators were weary of the rigidities of a regulatory regime dominated by the principle of local community sovereignty they inherited from the 1930s, and which they saw as a source of backwardness (certainly relative to Europe) and financial instability (think about the collapse of the savings and loans sector). The Federal Reserve, among others, started promoting the old idea that competition, rather than community, is the best way to both propel financial innovation and root out undesirable bank behavior. Regulators designed instruments that mimic market forces, hoping they would supply enough discipline. In 1999, Congress partially repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, seen as a major source of competitive disadvantage. Both principles—competition and community—were distinctly American, but they had different moments in the sun, different temporalities of dominance and latency.

We see the same dialectic playing out in the other two countries. During the same troubled period of the 1990s and 2000s, Canadian regulators diagnosed a different problem: the rights of depositors to be protected against excessive risk. To address this perceived weakness of the financial system, they increasingly sought to promote a prudent approach that suspended their traditional deference to elite autonomy. Spanish regulators, for their part, always worried about uncontrolled markets, and brought back the old principle of centralized administrative oversight in a way that led them to de-emphasize their established framework of corporatist harmony. These national differences in regulatory frameworks ended up mattering a lot when the asset-backed commercial-paper market collapsed in summer 2007, and when the financial crisis exploded in full a year later.

The Spanish case is interesting because, as Pernell argues, the country’s strict approach to securitization and loan loss provision largely helped to soften the blow of the financial crisis. But that story conveniently ends in 2009. If we include just a few additional years, Spain fared poorly during the Eurozone crisis that followed. Up until 2008, Spanish banks expanded domestic lending like there was no tomorrow. By 2008, the country’s home ownership rate was above 80%, higher than most other European nations. Then the domestic housing bubble popped, threatening to take down the entire economy and even the monetary system built around the euro. Plus, it turns out that holding large amounts of AAA-rated Eurozone government bonds in reserves does not help much when these bonds start to falter. In 2012, Spain ended up applying for a €100 billion bailout of its financial sector from the European Union. Some banks had to be nationalized. The irony is that Pernell’s framework helps to explain this very set of events: we can interpret it as a further reassertion of the state sovereignty principle, away from the principle of corporatist harmony, consistent with the dialectical relationship between the two principles of order. However, it does suggest, perhaps against Pernell’s (too?) optimistic view, that the Spanish approach was not necessarily much more effective in warding off crisis.

I do have a few additional quibbles, as one always does. First, Pernell’s framework is a bit mechanistic. I am French—believe me, I love symmetry and order—but why two principles, and only two? Second, Pernell’s view of culture (as “visions”) may feel rather disembodied at times. Cultural frameworks are potent precisely because of their inscription in material arrangements, institutions, and people’s lives. Consider, for instance, Neil Fligstein’sFootnote ³ emphasis on generational changes in personnel—a more grounded mechanism—as a driver of shifts in conceptions of corporate control. Third, Pernell does not explain how the meaning of each principle of order might also transform over time. For instance, historians of economics have shown how, within that field, the standards of what counts as “market competition” evolved a lot between the 1950s and the 1980s. So much so that by the 1980s, a highly concentrated economy could be seen as competitiveFootnote ⁴. But that understanding would have horrified earlier promoters of antitrust laws. My point is that an order culturally anchored in the idea of competition could very well have supported both a hands-on regulatory approach in the first part of the twentieth century and a more hands-off one in its last decades, when tolerance for high levels of concentration was much higher (and even a heavily concentrated economy was considered “competitive” as long as barriers to entry were low). As a cultural artefact, language moves, too. It is subject to constant deconstruction and reconstruction, and indexes different underlying meanings over time.

To be fair, Pernell’s account is intricate, precise, and historically sensitive to many of these variations. And, as the post-2008 Spanish example demonstrates, and perhaps as present-day developments in the United States might foresee, it helps account for some of the reversals that have taken place since the book’s timeframe ended. One glaring example is the recently passed GENIUS Act (2025) in the US, which endorses a generally benign and laissez-faire view of nonbank stablecoins and crypto derivatives. As a recent International Monetary Fund reportFootnote ⁵ (2025) points out, the largely unregulated appetite of US (and some Eurozone) banks for these assets is a source of great potential vulnerability for the international financial system. Will the coming crisis of these products—because a crisis will come—bring back the principle of community sovereignty as a source of stabilization? We can just sit back, open our copy of Visions of Financial Order, and wait.