Stuart Shields teaches international political economy at the University of Manchester. His research is concerned with critical approaches to international political economy and post-communist transition. He is the current convenor of the BISA International Political Economy working group (IPEG). He co-edited (with Ian Bruff and Huw Macartney) Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate and Dissensus. Facing up to financialisation and the aesthetic economy: high time for aesthetics in international political economy! Claes Belfrage School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Campus, London, E1 4NS, UK. E-mail: c.a.belfrage@qmul.ac.uk Journal of International Relations and Development (2011) 14, 383–391. doi:10.1057/jird.2011.11 Introduction ‘Aesthetics’ has been a core concern of modern European philosophy 1 (and other subject areas in the Humanities) since Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (1750). Its reified dominant meaning is the result of deep struggle and is linked to dominant ideological forms in the capitalist economy, of which International Political Economy (IPE) forms part. Below, I make the case that, if appro- ached ‘critically’, engagement with aesthetics presents ‘an unusually powerful challenge’ to such forms (Eagleton 1990: 3), forms which seem particularly important in a historical conjuncture in late capitalism of financialisation and the ‘aesthetic economy’. As such, it should be a central concern of critical IPE, with considerable contributions to be made to debates in IPE and International Relations (IR) more generally. Aestheticisation of the economy is not specific to late capitalism, but rather central to its scientific invention and popular legitimation. To render the market economy’s depersonalised and opaque nature of exchange legitimate as ‘capable of functioning as the fundament of collective life’ within the polity, it has to be aestheticised (Buck-Morss 1995: 439). Acting upon this ‘object’ then becomes a cultic practice (Lo¨ wy 2009). Since the transition to the aesthetic economy in the 1950s, which was facilitated by audio–visual technological Claes Belfrage Facing up to financialisation and the aesthetic economy 383