Book Project: Made by Money

My book project, entitled Made By Money: Politics, Economics, and the Self in Capitalist Modernity, examines how money and the formation of the modern economic self interact with democratic politics. The book joins recent cross-disciplinary scholarship that has sought to reveal and contest the political and ethical foundations of economic life. In critical conversation with this literature, I emphasize the ways in which political agency and identity have themselves been interwoven into processes of economic depoliticization. In particular, I focus on the institution of money to show how it is both made and also continuously re-makes us. To do so, I undertake novel rereadings of Aristotle, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, and Friedrich Hayek, as well as contemporary democratic theorists of money, to uncover and theorize a powerful but overlooked connection between money and the constitution of the self. By shaping desires, choices, imagination, affect, relationships, and relations to the natural and social worlds, modern money constructs the self in significant and far-reaching political ways, not least of which is to (re)produce behavior and beliefs that capitalist markets require to operate. I show how disregarding this insight has not only underwritten anti-political and anti-democratic myths about free markets, but also led to critical accounts that underestimate the subjectivities that continue to fuel the seductions of the market. Attending to the politics of economic self-making instead offers a deeper understanding of what is and can be political about money and the economy. Assessing this link between money and the formation of self contributes directly to theoretical and empirical debates about money’s role in politics, in shaping how we view and confront questions of social justice and economic inequality, and in our understanding of ongoing economic challenges to democracy.

Two chapters from this project have been published in Political Theory. “Beyond Governance and Prevention: On the Use(s) of Aristotle for Theorizing Money’s Politics” explores contemporary democratic theorists’ use of Aristotle to critically think about money and rereads him to show how attending to money’s ethical impact on the self yields a new understanding of its political valence. “The Use of Money in Society: Friedrich Hayek’s Social Work” argues that money shapes beliefs about free markets that are essential to making them possible.