The Master's Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It)

Finance serves the rich and powerful. We need to democratize it.

**Winner of the 2026 Outstanding Contribution to Political Sociology Book Award from the American Sociological Association**

**Winner of The Theory Prize, American Sociological Association.**

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? In The Master's Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer can be found in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital.

Today, finance guides and constrains our politics, but there is no reason why this must be so. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of institutional transformation rooted in the interconnectedness of finance and democracy.

Inspired by ancient Athens, where small groups chosen by lottery were used to ensure democratic participation, he shows how democracy and working-class power can be strengthened by introducing new forms of financial governance, focusing on the inclusion of historically excluded groups.

His proposals for democratic financial institutions point the way to imbuing finance with a socio-environmental purpose and the funding of a just green transition, social housing, and other necessary public goods. And these financial institutions might be the first step toward a whole new kind of economy.

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. He has written for the Boston Review, Jacobin, Noema, and the Washington Post.