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The more than modest aim ofthis review is to make a preliminary attempt at analytically classifying the rapidly growing accounts of the 2008 crisis. In order to make sense of the explanations put forward by sociologists, as well as by economists, policy analysts and experts, investigative journalists, and even practitioners of 'financial speculation,' I have organized my survey of this literature around three broad types, without negating the internal diversity and heterogeneity of these approaches. Each of these types highlights one key dimension of the implicit theoretical understandings of the preconditions of the recent global financial crisis: the unintended consequences of innovation; the combination of asset bubbles, inadequate regulation, and financial instability; and, finally, the crisis-prone character of capitalist dynamics and the overall financialization of the economy in late capitalism. These three thematic 'Keynesian/Minskian,' and 'Marxist' positiol1s, which 1 develop in Part 1 strictly as heuristic ideal types for the purpose of orienting analytical classification in Part II. That is, the necessarily sketchy introduction below is not meant to provide a comprehensive critical engagement with the views of Marx, Schumpeter, or Keynes/Minsky (treated here as a composite 'type', as I shall explain), but merely to accentuate, in a Weberian one-sided fashion, certain defining traits and their combinations, which seem to be recurrent in the literature that review in Part II. In other words, these three ideal types elaborated below do not claim to provide exhaustive synoptic surveys of Keynes's, Marx's, Minsky's, or Schumpeter's observations about crises, but simply to serve as analytical descriptors, which can help us better grasp significant differences among alternative ways of conceptualizing crises.
