Certainly, the accounts of their motivation provided by central actors in the move to financial derivatives are not of rational egoism. Leo Melamed's admiration for Friedman sat alongside a political inheritance of quite a different sort. When I asked him why he devoted effort to collective projects, Melamed cited the influence of his father, a member of the Jewish revolutionarysocialist Bund (Melamed interview). Even as a child, Melamed recalls, he was "able to sense the intense feelings [the Bund] generated" in his parents (Melamed and Tamarkin 1996, p. 22). "I will never forget," he says, "being wedged between them standing rigidly erect at Bund meetings in Bialystok that opened with the Shvue, the Bund's anthem an oath of allegiance. My mother held my hand tightly as she and my father sang, and I could feel the emotional choking that gripped both of them as they fervently swore never to forsake the battle on behalf of the working class. There among the mass of people with the decibels ringing in my ears, I knew something was going on, something big, something awe-inspiring, something eternal."

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 674