Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is--and what it might be--hasn't kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today's leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating. What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money. One of the book's central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists--including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it. Complete with a new preface that discusses recent developments in the evolution of money, the book draws out the ways in which its transformation could in turn radically alter society, politics, and economics.
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION IX ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XVII INTRODUCTION 1 1 ORIGINS Barter 17 Tribute 23 Quantification 27 Mana 30 Language 34 Violence 43 Conclusion 46 2 CAPITAL The Contradictions of Money 51 Credit Money 55 Finance Capital 59 Primitive Accumulation 63 When Credit Fails 66 Behind the Veil 72 Seeing Double 79 Conclusion 87 3 DEBT Debt's Untold Story 94 Credit and Nothing but Credit 102 Neochartalism 106 Schumpeter's Banks 111 Minsky's Half-Century 117 Strange Money 121 Austerity Myths 126 Conclusion 132 4 GUILT Ubermensch and Eternal Return 136 Capitalism, Debt, and Religion 142 Filthy Lucre 149 Conclusion 158 5 WASTE Money, Excretion, and Heterogeneous Matter 166 Derrida's Ghosts 179 Cool Money, Living Money 189 Conclusion 204 6 TERRITORY Westfailure 216 Nomisma 222 Deterritorialization 226 Empire 237 Euroland 251 Conclusion 266 7 CULTURE Money and Cultural Alienation 273 Polanyi and the Problem of Embeddedness 278 Relational Monies 286 Scales of Value 294 A Quality Theory of Money 298 Repersonalizing Impersonal Money 305 Conclusion 310 8 UTOPIA Simmel's Perfect Money 316 Fromm's Humanistic Utopia 330 Giving Time for Time 342 Rotting Money 346 Proudhon's Bank 351 Vires in Numeris 362 Toward a Monetary Commons 372 Conclusion 381 CONCLUSION 385 BIBLIOGRAPHY 395 INDEX 421
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