We need a new theory of money. The still-dominant theory of money as taught in intro textbooks is 100+ years old, and for almost that long we have known that it’s totally wrong. The best alternative are "heterodox" accounts developed in the 90s and 00s. These are indeed better overall descriptions of money, but they remain incomplete and inadequate: they rely too much on why the orthodoxy is wrong, thereby incorrectly assuming there is only one alternative (so-called heterodoxy). Money has no value develops a new (more subtle, more sophisticated) theory of money. It takes more seriously than any other work to date, the depth and seriousness of the fundamental claim that all money is credit. Money is not a thing, but a marker of a social relation of credit and debt between two parties. Money is not value itself; no form of money (as money) ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. Second, the book shows that not only is all money credit, but that in an important theoretical sense, all credit is money to the extent any credit/debt between two parties has the potential to be transferred to another party (thereby functioning as money). Finally, the book links this radical credit theory of money to today’s concrete money practices: this includes global capital flows, national and international monetary policy, and most of all the daily turnover in the money markets. The book therefore develops the needed conceptual framework to ask questions like: what is going on with Bitcoin (much less GameStop) in 2021.
Capitalist Economics introduces and explains the basic economic forces that shape the present and structure the future of capitalist societies today. Rejecting the idea that economics is a universal science of "choice" or the "efficient allocation of scarce resources," this book analyzes economic forces and relations as essential elements of a broader society. This entails understanding "the economic" as a logic that always operates alongside cultural, political, and social forces. As well, it requires grasping the economic as itself a product of historical development. This book explores the unique economic pressures found in capitalist societies, offering detailed yet concise analysis of basic concepts - commodities, money, exchange, interest - and investigating broader issues such as the source of profit, the nature of growth, and the role of technology and invention. Written for political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, cultural studies scholars, and beyond, the book is a completely new way of grasping socio-economic relations.
Modern economics does not explain, and does not even attempt to explain, capitalism; rather, both introductory texts and advanced scholarship presuppose capitalism as a universal, natural entity. In stark contrast, Capitalist Economics introduces and explains the basic economic forces that shape the present and structure the future of capitalist societies today. Rejecting the naive idea that economics is a universal science of "choice" or the "efficient allocation of scarce resources," this book analyzes economic forces and relations as essential elements of a broader society. This entails understanding "the economic" as a force or a logic that always operates alongside cultural, political, and social forces, and it requires grasping that force as itself a product of historical development. This book explores the unique economic forces found in capitalist societies, offering detailed yet concise analysis of basic concepts - commodities, money, exchange, interest - and investigating broader issues such as the source of profit, the nature of growth, and the role of technology and invention"--
What if "liberal democracy" were a contradiction in terms? This book distinguishes liberalism (a logic of order) from democracy (a principle of disordering) to defend a Rancièrean vision of impure politics. Disclosing Rancière's refusal of ontology as political, The Lessons of Rancière enacts a critical theory beyond unmasking and a democratic politics beyond liberalism.
The standard, linear view of history is founded on the belief that political outcomes are predetermined by what has gone before. This book challenges this view, arguing for what Samuel A. Chambers calls an untimely politics which renders the past problematic and the future unpredictable. This pathbreaking argument is advanced through a close reading of key texts in political theory and by entering into debates involving metaphysics, philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis versus discursive analysis. Chambers focuses on the theme of the relevance of language analysis to political debate, answering those critics who insist discourse approaches to politics are irrelevant. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida are used to challenge the political burden which is placed on language analysis to prove its value in the real world. Drawing from political theory and cultural studies Chambers takes on the same-sex marriage debate, showing how the use and misuse of language has contributed to an impasse that is not likely to be broken. Wide ranging and insightful, Untimely Politics makes a timely plea for a more politically relevant and culturally engaged form of intellectual engagement.
Over the past twenty-five years the work of Judith Butler has had an extraordinary impact on numerous disciplines and interdisciplinary projects across the humanities and social sciences. This original study is the first to take a thematic approach to Butler as a political thinker. Starting with an explanation of her terms of analysis, Judith Butler and Political Theory develops Butler’s theory of the political through an exploration of her politics of troubling given categories and approaches. By developing concepts such as normative violence and subversion and by elaborating her critique of heteronormativity, this book moves deftly between Butler’s earliest and most famous writings on gender and her more recent interventions in post-9/11 politics. This book, along with its companion volume, Judith Butler's Precarious Politics, marks an intellectual event for political theory, with major implications for feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies, queer theory and anyone with a critical interest in contemporary American ‘great power’ politics.
Political and economic models of society often operate at a level of abstraction so high that the connections between them, and their links to culture, are beyond reach. Bearing Society in Mind challenges these disciplinary boundaries and proposes an alternative framework—the social formation. The theory of social formation demonstrates how the fabric of society is made up of threads that are simultaneously economic, political, and cultural. Drawing on the work of theorists including Marx, Althusser, Butler, Žižek and Rancière, Bearing Society in Mindmakes the strongest case possible for the theoretical importance and political necessity of this concept. It simultaneously demonstrates that the social formation proves to be a very particular and peculiar type of “concept”—it is not a reflection or model of the world, but is definitively and concretely bound up with and constitutive of the world.
What if "liberal democracy" were a contradiction in terms? This book distinguishes liberalism (a logic of order) from democracy (a principle of disordering) to defend a Rancièrean vision of impure politics. Disclosing Rancière's refusal of ontology as political, The Lessons of Rancière enacts a critical theory beyond unmasking and a democratic politics beyond liberalism.
We need a new theory of money. The still-dominant theory of money as taught in intro textbooks is 100+ years old, and for almost that long we have known that it’s totally wrong. The best alternative are "heterodox" accounts developed in the 90s and 00s. These are indeed better overall descriptions of money, but they remain incomplete and inadequate: they rely too much on why the orthodoxy is wrong, thereby incorrectly assuming there is only one alternative (so-called heterodoxy). Money has no value develops a new (more subtle, more sophisticated) theory of money. It takes more seriously than any other work to date, the depth and seriousness of the fundamental claim that all money is credit. Money is not a thing, but a marker of a social relation of credit and debt between two parties. Money is not value itself; no form of money (as money) ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. Second, the book shows that not only is all money credit, but that in an important theoretical sense, all credit is money to the extent any credit/debt between two parties has the potential to be transferred to another party (thereby functioning as money). Finally, the book links this radical credit theory of money to today’s concrete money practices: this includes global capital flows, national and international monetary policy, and most of all the daily turnover in the money markets. The book therefore develops the needed conceptual framework to ask questions like: what is going on with Bitcoin (much less GameStop) in 2021.
Modern economics does not explain, and does not even attempt to explain, capitalism; rather, both introductory texts and advanced scholarship presuppose capitalism as a universal, natural entity. In stark contrast, Capitalist Economics introduces and explains the basic economic forces that shape the present and structure the future of capitalist societies today. Rejecting the naive idea that economics is a universal science of "choice" or the "efficient allocation of scarce resources," this book analyzes economic forces and relations as essential elements of a broader society. This entails understanding "the economic" as a force or a logic that always operates alongside cultural, political, and social forces, and it requires grasping that force as itself a product of historical development. This book explores the unique economic forces found in capitalist societies, offering detailed yet concise analysis of basic concepts - commodities, money, exchange, interest - and investigating broader issues such as the source of profit, the nature of growth, and the role of technology and invention"--
Every Economics textbook today teaches that questions of values and morality lie outside of, are in fact excluded from, the field of Economics and its proper domain of study, "the economy." Yet the dominant cultural and media narrative in response to major economic crisis is almost always one of moral outrage. How do we reconcile this tension or explain this paradox by which Economics seems to have both everything and nothing to do with values? The discipline of modern economics hypostatizes and continually reifies a domain it calls "the economy"; only this epistemic practice makes it possible to falsely separate the question of value from the broader inquiry into the economic. And only if we have first eliminated value from the domain of economics can we then transform stories of financial crisis or massive corporate corruption into simple tales of ethics. But if economic forces establish, transform, and maintain relations of value then it proves impossible to separate economics from questions of value, because value relations only come to be in the world by way of economic logics. This means that the "positive economics" spoken of so fondly in the textbooks is nothing more than a contradiction in terms, and as this book demonstrates, there's no such thing as "the economy." To grasp the basic logic of capital is to bring into view the unbreakable link between economics and value.
Michael Shapiro has been one of the most important thinkers and writers over the past two decades whose work has been extremely influential in fields as varied as political theory, international relations and cultural studies. This collection contains his seminal writings on such topics as discourse, culture and violence.
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