Subjects of Money: Political Practices of Self-Making in Capitalist Modernity
Subjects of Money: Political Practices of Self-Making in Capitalist Modernity theorizes a new way to think about and practice the politics of money. Through novel rereadings of theorists of money across the history of political thought, I argue that how we think about money matters for politics because money itself, in multifarious and historically conditioned ways, shifts and changes how we think and act: towards and about ourselves, the boundaries and possibilities of politics, and money itself. Beyond the daily register in which we worry about or reckon with money, I argue, is another politically salient register in which our uses of money constitute both us and our political approaches to it. I make this case by recovering an underexplored tradition of critical theoretical reflection on money’s imbrication with subjectivity in the work of Aristotle, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Hayek. Made possible by my excavation of this tradition is a richer and more expansive way of thinking critically about money and the politics of its manifold and constitutive presence in our lives.