Vincenzo Ruggiero, Dirty money: On financial delinquency

Published date01 December 2019
DOI10.1177/0004865819849747
Date01 December 2019
AuthorCostantino Grasso
Subject MatterBook Reviews
Book Reviews
Vincenzo Ruggiero, Dirty money: On financial delinquency. Oxford University Press: Oxford,
2017; 288 pp. ISBN 9780198783220, £70.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Costantino Grasso, Coventry University,UK
Dirty Money is a deeply inspiring book, which leads the reader to undertake a fascinat-
ing and masterfully crafted journey in time and space. Although the work is not directly
concerned with the origin and def‌inition of money, it represents a deep exploration of
the intimate relationship between capital, business operations, and f‌inancial
delinquency.
In the volume, Ruggiero reveals a culture of moral ambivalence beneath a f‌inancial
sector rife with fraud and corrupt practices. He stresses how the distance between f‌inan-
cial operators and the society affected by their f‌inancial operations makes them
“innocent” fraudsters, who seem unaware of the dramatic consequences of their actions.
Such a proposition is demonstrated in a captivating way throughout the book, for
instance where, in order to explain how anonymity and distance inf‌luence illicit behav-
iours, Ruggiero mentions Balzac’s passage in Le Pe
`re Gariot, where a character ponders
if he would murder an unknown person for a large sum of money.
In the f‌irst part of his work, Ruggiero illustrates how separating economics from
religion and ethics, which has operated inter alia through the creation of distinct aca-
demic disciplines, represents a historical turning point that allowed the unconditional
pursuance of f‌inancial interests. The naturalisation of the economy allowed economic
laws to be understood as ahistorical (like those related to the sciences) and, as a result,
placed them above human virtues. From Ruggiero’s perspective, such a phenomenon
generated a Plutocratic new world where economists, once transformed into catechists,
spread the faith of monetary value.
The work then turns into an analysis of Beccaria and Bentham’s perspectives on
f‌inancial crime, stressing how, although the early criminologists were perfectly aware
of the presence of predatory f‌inancial agents, they tended to impute f‌inancial delinquen-
cy to accidents and calamities.
In chapter four, Ruggiero immerses the reader in the century of railways and robber
barons, of iron, steel, empire, deadly wars, and f‌inancial distress. A period of time where
innovation and development were accompanied by speculation, periodic crisis, bubbles,
and bankruptcies. Where the volume mentions the UK Bubble Act 1720 and its repeal in
1825 (questioning whether the scandals that occurred in the 19th century could have
been avoided if the Act had still been in place), the reader might implicitly consider the
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2019, Vol. 52(4) 595–606
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865819849747
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