The Currency of Politics. The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes, 2022

Crisis narratives abound, indeed seem to accelerate, in academic writing as in our daily lives. Considering the late Reinhart Koselleck’s analyses, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. There, the “crisis concept” figures as a hallmark of modern historical consciousness itself, with its subjective sense of historicity, its demarcation of past, present, and future. “Crisis” is among other things the resulting condition of being caught between unsettling experience, on the one hand, and the ever-renewed expectation of novel futures, on the other. 1 Though absent from the book’s title, “crisis” permeates Stefan Eich’s important historical investigation of the “money concept.” So does the inspiration of Koselleck, including the latter’s understanding of modernity. Indeed, Eich transposes Koselleck’s understanding of crisis to the monetary field, casting it as a battleground for “rival conceptions of the future.” “Modern money,” he writes, “finds its purest expressions in crisis” (xiv). In a different vein, Eich shares with the economic historian Adam Tooze a particular diagnosis of contemporary malaise: part of “what has gone wrong” during a cascade of recent crises, financial and epidemic, is the state of monetary thought itself. In Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Tooze argued that a great and glaring blind spot shared by many of the actors involved in the bankruptcies and bailouts of 2008 and their aftermath was a catastrophic failure to acknowledge the politics of money, or as he put it in a passage quoted early on by Eich, that “…money and credit and the structure of finance piled on them are constituted by political power, social convention and law in the way that sneakers, smartphones and barrels of oil are not.” 2

The Currency of Politics thus reflexively situates itself in a crisis-ridden present, during which monetary matters appear at an impasse, both material and epistemological. One route through the disorienting “monetary interregnum,” Eich suggests, is through a revivified political theory, one that no longer abandons money to economists, or remains unproductively bifurcated between orthodox/heterodox, or “commodity vs. state” approaches, and instead restores it to evaluative musings about justice, power, and rule. To begin to rekindle such conceptual possibilities—a normative aspiration driving the book, and more fully developed in an epilogue—Eich sets his sights firmly on the past. There, he finds monetary thinkers articulating money’s political nature as they grappled with the financial crises of their time, recursively taking stock of, and in dialogue with, those who preceded them. And as John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, did before him, the author looks to these very predecessors for orientation. Indeed, the footnotes of Marx and Keynes illuminated a convenient trail, ultimately leading Eich back to Aristotle, where the razor-sharp retrospective inquiry begins. There, Eich finds a seminal elaboration of the “currency of politics”—a phrase he coins to capture anew the “democratic possibilities” of money, obscured in today’s conventional view that money is and should be “de-politicized,” a view in turn all too blind to its own political intentions. Geological metaphors are central throughout: stratigraphic layers of buried thought are uncovered, and attention is paid to how they were interred in the first place. Though each chapter ends with a compressed, but illuminating discussion of how its protagonist was later read or misread (as when Joseph Schumpeter and Geoffrey Ingham mistake Marx for a commodity theorist (130)), a protean sixth chapter (“Silent Revolution”) looks more specifically at how money came to be evacuated from political theory in the post-Bretton Woods era.

Eich’s opening investigation of Aristotle is exemplary, announcing many of the book’s great strengths: it is richly contextualized, drawing with sensitivity on a wide interdisciplinary secondary literature; it allows for conceptual ambivalence and diversity within a single author’s thought; it attends to matters of language and translation, and to material aspects of currency (to which money, as notion, is not reducible.) Where Aristotle’s nomisma (coin, among other shifting meanings) and chrēmata (wealth) have both been reductively rendered as “money” in English, for example, much distortion has ensued. And as Eich also points out, those who confine themselves to the Politics encounter Aristotle solely on how coins ease exchange. They have been prone to distort the fourth-century philosopher into a proto-commodity theorist of money. They also erase the world in which Aristotle wrote—one in which fragmented coinage bore the mark of individual city-states (poleis) and may have owed more to the building and regulation of earthly communities—to politics, in short—than to the demands of trade. Lesser-known passages in theNicomachean Ethics thus place coinage, like the law to which it was etymologically related, at the heart of civic relations and justice: as outcome and terrain of practical deliberation and, through its capacity to produce commensurability, as ground for apprehending the reciprocity on which a healthy polity depended.

Eich likewise restores the centrality of money to later Western political philosophy. Rooted in the demands of statecraft in post-revolutionary, globally expansionist late seventeenth-century England, John Locke’s complex analysis would also come to be flattened into the orthodoxy that money had “intrinsick value” that lay beyond politics. Instead, Eich finds in Locke a radically new, “in between” stance: coin had neither an intrinsic value found in nature (as in bullionism) nor value purely set by human convention (as in nominalism). Set by initial fiat, the metal content of coin was open to manipulations that jeopardized contracts and property domestically and compromised external trade. A ruler who succumbed to the temptation to debase the value of coinage violated trust— a value as central to Locke’s political philosophy as reciprocity was for Aristotle. Admirably synthesizing works on how exploding public credit marked eighteenth-century western-European political thought and providing a monetary context for German idealists’ debates surrounding “reality” and “semblance,” Eich then takes a foray into Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s lesser-known musings on fiat money. Britain experimented with unbacked paper money between 1797 and 1821 to better wage its counter-revolutionary war against France. For Fichte, intrinsically valueless currency had more radical potential: it could free a polity from the dangers of external commerce or expansion, opening a more rational, deliberative space of autarky, suitable for advancing the autonomy of its citizens.

Uncovering Marx’s monetary politics was a more arduous task, and the result is a stimulating tour de force drawing on a wide set of writings—including recently discovered notebooks (270), and Marx’s pieces for the New York Tribune, wherein he gleefully followed “the global flow of capital,” as it swelled into the financial crises of his day. Among the nuggets uncovered by Eich are Marx’s glimpses of the financial architecture of France’s empire, formal and informal. (Scholars working on the gains to French and American bankers from France’s Haitian indemnity would do well to track down the sources listed in Eich’s footnotes.) The chapter does not lend itself to easy summary but carefully unpacks Eich’s felicitous twist on Marx: “States make money even if they do not always do so as they please” (138). John Maynard Keynes gets a fresh reading too, emerging as a kind of “limit” case liberal theorist, accepting some need for “economic de-politicization,” and discretion on the part of public authorities, yet roundly critiquing the conceptual unsoundness of, and practical inequities produced by “naturalized” money in the form of the gold standard. Money in any form was a political institution in need of management by virtue of its effects on social justice and its disruptive potential both within and across states. But constitutional structures (including supranational entities managing an international reserve currency) and technocratic experts might achieve greater justice and stability than the democratic choices of a citizenry ignorant of monetary complexity.

These tightly argued contextual analyses will leave readers with much to reflect upon. Querying how Koselleck’s “conventional historiography of the crisis concept” shows up in recent claims of financial crisis, anthropologist Janet Roitman warned a decade ago that crisis narratives, in their efforts to “secure the world for observation,” tend to dissimulate or take for granted the “grounds for knowledge of crisis,” and have broadly served the “status quo.” 3 Even in his laudably reflexive effort to generate new forms of monetary knowledge, Eich is perhaps not totally immune from Roitman’s concerns. The choice to revisit canonical male figures in Western political philosophy to enrich our vocabulary surrounding “money power” certainly leaves plenty of other avenues and histories available for exploration. So does the privileging of the ‘national’ and the alternately amorphous or euphemistic ‘international’ as the central arenas of practical monetary politics. Other geopolitical formations, including the obvious imperial and colonial ones, remain out of focus—though we get tantalizing glimpses out of the corner or Eich’s eye–through Marx, as hinted above, or when we find Keynes condoning a colonial exception—the non-convertibility of local currency into gold within India—in a system that not coincidentally, and with little apparent need for justification, secured South Asian gold reserves for British financial stability (144).

Some readers will be more surprised by the apparent state of current political theory as incisively portrayed by Eich than by the central claim that “money” is profoundly implicated in matters of collective life, trust, and power at various scales. Monetary power’s asymmetries, its potential for violence, its spatial characteristics, hierarchies, and justifications, not to mention the consistent plurality of currencies in many parts of the world have been explored in considerable detail in the rapidly expanding critical literature on monetary practices across time, space, and social differences. Such work is very much grist for the mill of those who, like Eich, might want to expand the monetary vocabulary of political theory beyond just-so stories of money’s origins, or beyond mythical abstractions featuring transhistorical, singular, universal ‘money,’ not to mention ‘states’ or ‘markets.’

In the meantime, this rigorously ambitious work offers a treasure trove for historians: for those teaching longue-durée histories of money, for those needing keys to the monetary present from which they write (bewildered as they may be by demagogic critiques of central banks or allured by deceptive private monies peddled by oligarchic platform providers) and for those wanting to enrich the conceptual repertoire from which they might draw. Intellectual historians will also find plenty of trails opened—and more compelling work to be done in documenting how rock-solid boundaries between the “economic” and the “political” crystallized in the first place, and how they might be dissolved.

• 1

  For helpful commentary on Koselleck’s various writings on “crisis” and “modernity” (Neuzeit), see Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014).

• 2

  Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World(New York: Viking, 2018), 10, quoted in Eich, 228, n.3.

• 3

  Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 10.