Chapter 1: The Nature of Money and the Cult of the Market 1. The Nature of Money a. Commodity Theory of Money i. Smith and Menger ii. The Myth of Barter iii. The ideological assumptions of orthodox economics iv. If not barter than what? b. Credit Theory of Money i.
Innes and Ingham c. State Theory of Money i. Knapp and Singh 2. The Religion of Money a. The Cult of the Market, Boldeman b. The Market as God, Cox c. The Enchantments of Mammon, McCarraher 3. The rise of the "economy" according to Dotan Leshem a.
The Origins of Neoliberalism 4. Disclaimer about Anti-Semitism a. Anti-Semitism in Europe b. Contemporary Anti-Semitism 5. Money and Thoughtlessness: initial claims Chapter 2: Money and the Axial Age 1. Money in the Preaxial Age a. Debt i. Debt between friends vs debt as slavery ii.
Mesopotamian Debt Forgiveness (Michael Hudson) iii. Jewish Jubilee year 2. Money in the Axial Age a. Coins and War i. Coinage in the ancient world and philosophy (Money and early Greek Mind: Seaford) b. Distrust of Merchants (Marcel Hénaff) i. Plato bans merchants in The Republic ii. Aristotle limits merchants iii.
Why? 1. Merchants as strangers 2. Atomism (Seaford) 3. Merchants as self-interested, not connected to community a. Unscrupulous c. Money as unnatural i. Aristotle (Marcel Hénaff) 1. Grows unnaturally 2.
Selling time 3. Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Taussig) 4. Addictive accumulation 5. Warps character d. Money and character i. Protean bull shitter (Money and theatre in England: Agnew) ii. Man with no Qualities e. Abstraction over concreteness (Seaford) i.
Loss of context f. Qualitative over Quantitative i. Loss of judgement ii. Modern method g. The Dialectic of Purity i. Jesus and Money Chapter 3: Animist Ontologies and Axial Solutions 1. Part One: Living Cosmos (Viveiros de Castro, Brague) a. Porous Self and Connection with the World (Taylor) b.
Gift Relationships with Non-humans i. Gifts vs Exchange 1. Mauss 2. Gifts and Commodities (Gregory) 3. See Ch 6 c. Abstraction d. Quantification 2. Can gift cultures be recovered? a.
Karatani''s The Structure of World History 3. Part Two: How to Deal with the Dangers of Money a. State Theory of Money i. Singh 4. The rise of the "economy" according to Dotan Leshem [May also fit here] a. The Origins of Neoliberalism 5. Proper relation of community to money: i. Franciscan Wealth, Todeschini Chapter 4: The Modern Attack on the Traditional Suspicion of Money Part 1: How did modernity overcome these traditional moral limitations on money and markets? 1.
Grim Reality vs Ancient Idealism (Machiavelli and Leo Strauss) a. Instead of basing social organization on how we SHOULD be instead base it on how we ARE 2. Subtraction Story and FACTS (Charles Taylor) a. Once we get rid of myth we are supposedly left with facts 3. Religious shifts: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 4. Homo economicus and social transparency (Hirschman) 5. Free markets and complexity (Hayek) 6. The Utopian image of market societies (Taylor) a.
Defense of modernity based on certain positive vision of rationality, freedom, honor, etc. Part 2: Homo Economicus: An Epistemology of Ignorance 1. What is an epistemology of ignorance? a. Charles Mills b. Linda Alcoff 2. Why is modernity an epistemology of ignorance? 3. Modern has normalized a wrong understanding of: a. human nature b.
human reason c. ontology d. epistemology 4. Which in turn lead to misguided: a. Ethics b. Economics c. Social organization Chapter 5: Against Utilitarianism: Mauss and Gift Cultures 1. Homo Economicus was ascendant by the early 1900s 2.
Utilitarian assumptions often were (and continue to be) read back into history 3. But this was disrupted by the discoveries of anthropology: 4. Mauss and Gift Cultures a. Premodernity qualitative vs qualitative modernity b. Commodity Exchange: alienable things between "independent" actors c. Vs Gift exchange: un-alienable things between mutually dependent actors (Gregory) d. It turned out no premodern societies bartered and many had versions of gift exchange 5. BUT this was fraught with potential misunderstandings a.
modern states had sought to "purify" economic motives to maximize efficiency b. this meant separating out work from play, family, etc. to create a sphere of ONLY work (E.P. Thomson) c. gifts, love, selflessness, care, etc. were pushed into other spheres: the domestic sphere, religion, etc. i.
this set up an opposition between "pure gift", "pure art", "pure love" and "pure" self-interested work that marked entire spheres of life d. this opposition reflects the separation of modern spheres that is a part of the rationalization of modern society (Weber, Habermas) e. but NOT premodern life, which was "mixed up" i. gifts were often NOT always nice in premodernity: means of controlling others, etc. f. opponents of modern utilitarianism/homo economicus sometimes latch onto gifts as a supposed alternative to modernity, when the issue if more complex than this 6. Do we have to give up on gifts then? (answer in Ch 6) Chapter 6: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion 1. This opposition between "pure modernity" and "pure love/gifts/art" leads to a second problem: a.
There is a repeated pattern of critics of modernity (Ricouer''s "masters of suspicion") attacking the pretentions and reductivism of modernity but also undermining the obverse "purities" of love, art, and gifts b. In rejecting the modern pretension of "pure" rationality, "pure" language (logic), "pure" facts, etc. and emphasizing the complex "mixed" reality of modern practices, there is a tendency to claim that there is no escaping "power" or "strategy" c. Thus even from critics of modernity, we find doubt about the possibility of gifts, love, and community 2. What is the Hermeneutics of Suspicion? a. Marx: objective claims can be ideological b. Nietzsche: objective claims can be driven by will to power c. Freud: reason can be driven by unconscious desires 3.
Masters of Suspicion show us that modern arguments often position themselves as objective and scientific when they are not as "pure", disinterested and objective as they claim a. It turns out it is more complex and "mixed" b. But this seems to always leave us with "interestedness" or "strategy" 4. Similarly, the obverse positions of gifts, art and love have also been targeted/examined and often criticized for the claims to "purity" and disinterestedness a. This also leaves us with "interestedness" and strategy b. Examples of this pattern: i. Bourdieu Gifts (This is the primary example treated at length) ii. Zelizer Money (even "pure" money is criticized!) iii.
Foucault Knowledge (no escaping Power) 5. Is there only "interestedness" and "strategy"? a. Ironically, this claim actually feeds back into the capitalist assumption of self-interest and the omnipresence of strategy b. See the suspicion of Habermas'' claim for a communicative rationality that is not as compromised as "instrumental rationality". Is there such a thing as non-strategic action? 6. Again, where does this leave love, gifts, and community? (see Ch 8) Chapter 7: The Phenomenology of Money and the Role of Money in Neoliberal Thoughtlessness Part One: Abstract Money 1. The classic presentation of "pure" money is Georg Simmel''s Philosophy of Money and affirms many of the traditional suspicions of money 2. Zelizer critiques Simmel''s "pure" money and argues money is always "mixed" a.
This leads her to conclude that the traditional worries about money are not a problem 3. Against Zelizer, I claim the phenomenology of money shows that Zelizer is not correct about the dangers of money: they are real and they are a key part of our neoliberal thoughtlessness 4. Phenomenologically, all the traditional suspicions of money have some legitimacy, but two are especially important: a. Abstraction b. Quantification 5. Abstraction and quantification strip the world of context and meaning: This is a key difference between the qualitative, enchanted cosmos or premodernity and the quantitative, disenchanted universe of modernity. 6. Phenomenology shows the difference between quantified "objective.