The Currency of Justice:
Money and Political Thought
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of
Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Stefan Eich
Dissertation Director: Seyla Benhabib
New Haven, Connecticut
December 2016
Abstract
The Currency of Justice:
Money and Political Thought
Stefan Eich
2016
This dissertation excavates discussions of currency as a central political institution
in the history of political thought and explores its implications for contemporary political
theory. By recovering five historical moments of monetary politics I reconstruct the
neglected monetary dimension of the political thought of Aristotle, John Locke, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte, John Maynard Keynes, and Jürgen Habermas and argue that money is
not only an economic tool but also a political institution constitutive of any political
community. In each episode, I combine contextualist historical reconstruction with
detailed textual analysis and an attention to the diachronic reception of texts. While
political thought is replete with suspicions against the abstraction and acquisitiveness of
money, I contend that this view, on its own, risks obscuring money’s political dimension.
My thesis thus challenges political theorists who straightforwardly oppose politics to
money. I argue instead that currency is also an essential tool of civic recognition that
mirrors the civic uses of speech in fostering trust and acknowledgement, and a political
institution of reciprocity whose benefits and burdens require fair sharing. This does not
displace worries about commodification but complements them by an account of
currency as a malleable political institution.
In arguing for an overcoming of the defensive posture of containing money, I
develop three related lines of argument through an engagement with the history of
political thought. First, I argue that money is constitutively political because politics is
constitutively monetary. Both the abstract civic relation of equality among citizens as
well as the ability of political communities to satisfy mutually complementary needs is
intimately tied to currency. Secondly, I illustrate that currency is a constitutive institution
of any political community because it touches on the very ability of political communities
to fairly distribute resources, enact compensations, and impose fines. Thirdly, I
emphasize that money is a symbolic institution of the collective imagination that connects
the present to the future. Ideas and expectations are thus foundational to the way money
works, or fails to work.
If this political side of money has been largely obscured, naturalized, and
mystified, I trace one important root of this neglect to John Locke’s influential political
theory of depoliticized money. Building on this argument, I provide an account of how an
awareness of the political dimension of money could be obscured while arguing at the
same time that this displacement rests itself on a politics of depoliticization that can never
be complete. The politics of money, I contend, is inescapable, even where it expresses
itself in the form of an anti-politics. While modern money is a complex tool of economic
accumulation, the principles on which a monetary regime rests are inevitably political in
nature and responsive to demands for justification. As I explore by tracing analogies
between money and speech throughout this dissertation, currency is a constitutional
project. Like any legal constitution, a monetary order is a site of distribution and debate.
Money may be filthy lucre but it is also the currency of justice.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ iv
Introduction: The Currency of Justice .................................................................... 1
1.
Coinage and the Polis .................................................................................... 36
Aristotle on Currency as a Political Institution
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
2.
The Modern Depoliticization of Money......................................................... 83
John Locke and the Great Recoinage of 1696
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
2.6
2.7
3.
Introduction
The Origin of Money
“By a Tacit and Voluntary Consent”
Linguistic Instability
Trust, the Bond of Society
The Great Recoinage
Conclusion
Completing the Social Contract ..................................................................... 150
Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the Politics of Paper Money
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
4.
Introduction
Reciprocity and Currency
Nomisma in the Ancient Greek World
Commensuration and Equality
Monetary Justice in the Ancient Greek World
The Other Side of the Coin
Conclusion
Introduction
Edmund Burke and the French Revolutionary Assignats
A Cosmopolitan Currency of Industriousness
A Weekend in February 1797
Fiat Money in the Closed Commercial State
Conclusion
Constitutionalizing Money............................................................................ 211
John Maynard Keynes and Monetary Reform
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4
4.5
4.6
4.7
Introduction
Naturalistic Illusion
A Managed Currency
The Politics of Depoliticization
National Self-Sufficiency and Internationalism
Monetary Eutopia
Conclusion
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
5.
Silent Revolution ....................................................................................... 283
Jürgen Habermas and the Missing Political Theory of Money
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
5.7
Introduction
Differentiation and Neutralization
Crisis after Bretton Woods
Contradictions of Capitalism
The Politics of Disinflation
The Missing Political Theory of Money
Conclusion
Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 360
Appendix .................................................................................................................. 382
Abbreviations............................................................................................................ 384
Notes on the Text ..................................................................................................... 385
Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 386
iii