In the 1970’s a student and a professor at UCSC began a conversation about the future of capitalism. Years later those conversations became a friendship, collaboration, and eventually took an institutional form in this Initative. Stephen Bruce and Prof. Robert Meister invite you to join in this exploration.
Stephen Bruce, Founder
Stephen Bruce
Stephen Bruce co-founded The Alcentra Group in 2001 through the acquisition of Imperial Credit Asset Management (ICAM) which he helped start in 1997. He was responsible for growing Alcentra’s US asset management business, including the origination and management of leveraged securities funds. Before Alcentra, Stephen was with a hedge fund that focused on distressed debt and senior secured bank loans.
Prior to joining the hedge fund in 1995, Stephen worked for Lehman Brothers in London. In that capacity, he was responsible for coordinating high yield loan credit reviews and due diligence and providing trading opportunities to Lehman Brothers’ U.S. bank loan investor base. Mr. Bruce started Lehman Brothers high yield loan desk in London in 1993 and began his career at Lehman Brothers in 1992 in New York as one of two traders hired to build a bank loan business within Lehman’s High Yield Bond Group.
Before joining Lehman, Stephen originated and was co-manager of a $225 million portfolio consisting of investments in leveraged buyout funds and venture capital funds for Imperial Corporation of America (“ICA”). Mr. Bruce began his career at ICA in September of 1987 as a financial analyst prior to initiating management of the fund portfolio in 1990.
Robert Meister, Director
Professor of Social and Political Thought in the Division of Social Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Bob Meister is a political philosopher who works at the intersection of jurisprudence, political economy, theology and cultural theory. His early publications focused on American constitutional development (especially in the area of rights and regulation) and theories of the state arising from Marx and Hegel. In Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx (1990), he reconstructs Marx’s approach to reading his nineteenth-century sources to develop a parallel argument using late-twentieth century thought in moral philosophy, political science and neo-classical economics. He has more recently continued this Marx-inspired project by developing his own critique of the discourse of human rights that accompanied the apparent triumph of global capitalism after 1989. (After Evil: A New Discourse of Human Rights, forthcoming, November 2010 Columbia University Press) Since 2008, his research has returned to questions of valuation and regulation, focusing on late-twentieth century theories that foreground the pricing of options.
Bob Meister has been an active critic of University of California privatization, serving for ten years as President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations and for five years on the Academic Senate Budget and Planning committees of his campus and UC. In 1980, he founded the Legal Studies Program at UC Santa Cruz, which he subsequently chaired. He presently teaches in the Politics, Anthropology, and History of Consciousness graduate programs at UCSC, as well as undergraduate courses on political theory, political theology and human rights. He was educated in Philosophy at Princeton and Oxford and in both Government and Law at Harvard, and has subsequently held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard Law School, Mellon Foundation and University of California Humanities Research Institute.
Continue Reading: Selected Publications
Benjamin James Lozano, Curricular Coordinator
Lecturer in Politics and Legal Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Benjamin Lozano is a lecturer in the Politics and Legal Studies Department. He teaches the undergraduate upper division course sponsored by the Rethinking Capitalism Project, titled Market Crisis & the Future of Capitalism. His research involves the political and legal cultures surrounding states of emergency, crisis theory, the financialization of market capitalism, and export psychoanalysis.
Continue Reading: Selected Publications
Advisory Board
Joshua Aizenman, Professor of Economics
Barbara Epstein, Professor of History of Consciousness
Daniel Friedman, Professor and Undergraduate Program Director of Economics
Deborah Gould, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Tyrus Miller, Professor of Comparative Literature, Cowell College Provost, and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies
Lisa Rofel, Department Chair and Professor of Anthropology
Anna Tsing, Professor of Anthropology