The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press, 2022)

This book recovers and explores an account of currency as a central political institution. By studying six moments of monetary crisis and the imprint they left in the history of political thought I argue that currency was long seen as a constitutive political institution in the ancient polis as well as the modern state. For the classical polis, I show in the first chapter, Aristotle’s foundational account describes currency (nomisma) not merely as a medium of economic exchange but also, alongside speech, as an essential tool for fostering habitual bonds of reciprocity among citizens. The second chapter relies on John Locke’s influential involvement in the Coinage Crisis of 1695 to offer an integrated account of Locke’s philosophy of language and his political philosophy of money both of which are characterized by an ambivalent worry about the fragility of societal trust and the threat posed by semantic instability. The third chapter is framed through the introduction of paper money during the British suspension period (1797-1821) and traces how the experiment resonated with continental European thinkers such as the German Romantics, in particular J.G. Fichte and Adam Müller who both based their philosophies of the state on the new presence of fiat money. The fourth chapter turns to Karl Marx's financial journalism of the 1850s and the global banking panic of 1857 to capture the rise of transatlantic banking and the politics of the gold standard. The fifth chapter introduces John Maynard Keynes and recovers his monetary internationalism alongside his better-known critique of the gold standard. Starting with a reading of Keynes’s call for monetary reform the chapter sets out to recover Keynes as a political theorist of money and the politics of depoliticization. The six chapter concludes by contrasting the pervasiveness of monetary politics in the post-Bretton Woods world with its almost complete absence in political theory since the 1970s. The conclusion relates this revisionist history to the Financial Crisis and the politics of global money today. In each episode I combine historical contextualism with attention to the diachronic reception of ideas. Applying my analysis to contemporary concerns, I show that modern monetary regimes result from diverse political struggles not only over money’s distributive effects but also over its uses as a speech-like tool of recognition and trust.

Related writings

Die Poetik des Geldes, Süddeutsche Zeitung (January 22, 2015). Occasioned by the European Central Bank's announcement of its quantitative easing program , I wrote on the politics of central banking and the poetics of modern money (in German).

Radio story by Marketplace on my research concerning the British suspension period in February 1797 and what it tells us about modern central banking.

The Political Thought of John Maynard Keynes

As an extension of my work on the politics of money, I am also currently working on a book project on John Maynard Keynes’s political thought based on his extensive political writings and his engagement with the history of economic and political thought. Keynes is today rarely, if ever, considered or taught as a social theorist or political thinker. He is more likely to be invoked as an adjective, gesturing toward arguments for either fiscal stimulus or the postwar welfare state. Both reductions are deeply misleading. I hope to introduce political theorists instead to Keynes as an under-appreciated political thinker, emphasizing in particular his evolving response to the problem of liberal world order at the dusk of empire. Keynes was not just one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. He was also an eloquent political commentator, an active political campaigner, and a perceptive theorist of the domestic politics of democratic opinion formation as well as the international politics of military and economic competition.

A part of the project related to Keynes’s discussion of Indian money and B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of Keynes will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Ambedkar, edited by Anupama Rao and Shailaja Paik.

Commercial Society and Perpetual Growth

I am also deeply interested in questions of political temporality and its relation to the paradigm of perpetual economic growth. In this project I follow debates about political temporality, economic change, and environmental degradation from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth century. Provisionally entitled Commercial Society before Perpetual Growth: The Politics of the Steady State, the project is structured as a political history of the steady state and its demise. Its starting point is the observation that eighteenth-century thinkers of commercial society still lived in a world prior to the carbon revolution. Yet if carbon-based growth allowed the nineteenth century to break out of the previous constraints of nature and diminishing returns to land, narratives of perpetual growth were nonetheless remarkably slow in asserting themselves. Recovering the premises and outlines of debates about the steady state and the theodicy of economic growth makes available valuable intellectual resources and allows for a re-framing of powerful contemporary narratives that link progress to economic growth.

The Future of Money

As part of my research on political theories of money in the history of political thought I have become increasingly interested in assessing the grand political promises and grim realities of new forms of electronic money, such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based payments systems. So far the project has produced an edited volume on how to regulate cryptocurrencies and an overview of the politics of Bitcoin that stresses the ways in which Bitcoin’s utopian politics of private money obscures its actual function as a speculative asset beyond regulation and taxation. I am planning to do more work on other competing visions of private money, such as for example facebook’s Libra project.