Jakob Feinig opens Moral Economies of Money by introducing a well-documented premise: that American money “users” and money “issuers” have radically different relationships to the currency and, for this reason, they play fundamentally different roles in shaping the domestic economy. These differences are ignored both by neoclassical economists and by most economic historians, and Feinig joins a host of scholars—many of them familiar to readers of this site—who argue that scrutinizing the history of money’s design is a prerequisite for understanding its dynamism. Specifically, chartalist and constitutional scholarship on finance uncovers how money’s origins in credit issue and the changing legal arrangements that govern creation of those credits help determine peoples’ access to money and, as a result, how the economy’s wealth is used and distributed. Money’s origins in state-issued debt have long been erased from conventional discussions of finance and that erasure, critics insist, continues to be consequential. What do conventional treatments of money leave out? From the colonial era to the present, American money “users” have relied upon a widely circulating, pound- or dollar-denominated currency made up of IOUs from money “issuers”—select institutions empowered to create these instruments and introduce them into the financial system. These instruments are credits; they are promises to their initial recipient or to a current holder that the issuer will accept them back, in the future, as forms of payment. And the steady creation of these generally acceptable, transferable credits has enabled money users both to meet their financial obligations to the government and participate in a wide range of market exchanges. Compare the issuers’ relationship to the same currency. Colonial authorities, the U.S. government, and chartered banking institutions have—through the act of lending or spending—literally created the credits upon which American money users depend. Yet once created, these IOUs (today, Federal Reserve Notes or bank checking deposits) serve a singular purpose for their issuers: they can be received back in payment. After this, the institution can’t “use” them again. For this system to function, issuers have to destroy their own IOUs when debtors return them in the process of repaying a loan or meeting a tax obligation. Logically it follows that money’s design (how it is legally constituted) and the decisions of its issuers (namely government spending, monetary policy, tax collection, and credit allocation) are decisive in structuring the currency’s creation and initial distribution, before it is widely circulated among users. Of course, those users’ needs and preferences—their demand for the currency—are key determinants of the money supply, of how much money circulates at a given time. Today bank lending, for example, fills much of that need. But it is the money issuers that set the terms upon which new currency is created and eventually, if the IOU is redeemed, how it is extinguished. And so regardless of need, money users’ access to the currency is always mediated by a legal design and by choices that reflect money issuers’ priorities. More concretely, spending and lending by the U.S. government and banks is selective; they issue money to some and not to others. And “those who receive money first,” Feinig and others remind us, make crucial decisions about “where it flows”—that is, where and among whom it initially circulates (5). If one accepts this premise (as I do), then Moral Economies is revelatory, because Feinig documents how a centuries-old divide in Western visions of money—between models that recognize the issuer/user distinction and those that reject it—helps us read the history of American monetary politics and, at key moments, how that intellectual divide has actively shaped its course. He does so by identifying a history of “monetary knowledges,” a shorthand for the political cultures that have taught Americans the relationship between finance and governance. The detailed narrative begins in the colonial era and ends with the New Deal. And the term “monetary knowledge” describes both ideas and related practices. The ideas are shared beliefs about money’s nature (its origins and the source of its value) and functions (what its issue and use accomplish). The practices are the real-life creation and uses of money that together instantiate those shared ideas. (Pierre Bourdieu’s work on “praxis” is a good introduction to this dynamic.) Feinig argues that the dominant iteration of these ideas and practices in any given era reveals Americans’ awareness of money’s design and their relationship to it. He names the first category of politics and knowledge a “moral economy of money,” which describes episodes or eras when money users’ knowledge of design both enables and encourages participation in monetary politics, and even spurs movements for financial reform. At these times, the architecture of money—in its myriad forms—was visible; money was “an intelligible relation between a money issuer and money users,” not simply “a quantity of objects perceived as neutral” (33).  In sharp contrast, “monetary silencing” describes periods when money’s inner workings are masked from public view. Users are “disconnected from knowledge about the choices involved in institutional design [and so] cease to relate to monetary institutions as political beings” (9). Instead, the prevailing narratives and institutional arrangements encourage them to view the currency as a commodity-like token that can—and should—be divorced from politics. The colonial era was a heyday of “moral economies,” Feinig shows us, in part because the dearth of specie made monetary innovation a necessity. The scarcity of Spanish silver coins, for example, necessitated the use of other credit arrangements; officials monetized commodities (wampum, tobacco) and meanwhile colonists relied upon oral promises, book money (merchants’ ledger entries), and promissory notes. This had practical, even pedagogic, effects; the mechanisms governing exchange—the economy’s everyday reliance upon circulating credits that calculated payments in a shared money of account—exposed the process of monetary issue and the relation (thus value) of various pay tokens to an official, state-sanctioned form (specie). Similarly, Civil War-era Greenback issue “place[d] the governmental power to make money in plain public view” and “showcased [its] capacity to mobilize resources by issuing money.” Because much of the circulating currency was literally war debt, money users saw that “public debt is public currency.” Meanwhile, the new financial institutions chartered by the National Banking Act reminded them that “banks were . . . creatures of government” (83, 85, 91). Feinig does not simply interpret American monetary history through a chartalist and constitutional lens. He also documents that Americans often recognized the political and distributional implications of money’s design and acted upon this awareness. A careful reading of Cotton Mather’s and John Blackwell’s defense of Massachusetts’ paper issue (the first in Western history) reveals that contemporaries understood “the relation of credit and debt between colonists and government” and the role of tax receivability in determining the currency’s value (25-7). Greenbackers not only demanded expansion of a public fiat currency but campaigned by proclaiming the stakes of monetary design. “The right to make and issue money is a sovereign power,” declared the National Greenback Party’s 1880 platform, “to be maintained by the people for their own benefit” (96). Here and elsewhere Feinig shows that American money users have repeatedly “[taken] part in shaping monetary institutions” and with them “money creation” (1-2). Efforts at “monetary silencing” were usually led by elites, often in response to demands for the democratization of monetary production. When experiments with land banking in colonial Pennsylvania afforded specie-poor citizens greater access to loaned funds, William Douglass published a critique insisting that “money” (specie) and “credit” (bills of credit, bank notes, and other mid-level forms) were not commensurable. The former captured real wealth, in his view, while the latter was merely a contractual promise to pay later, with (again, inherently valuable) money (50-53). And famously, Robert Morris agreed to help finance the war against Britain only in exchange for policies—abolishing land banks, retiring Pennsylvania’s bills of credit, and chartering the Bank of North America—that pushed back against “democratic control over political-economic life,” privileging bank-issued money and so “encourag[ing] a centralization of wealth and power” (58). These and similar episodes of monetary silencing depicted the currency as a commodity-like good, best managed by (presumably neutral) governmental authorities and the select institutions granted permission to facilitate its circulation. The U.S. Constitution made silencing easier and marked a foundational rupture with a comparably legible world of monetary design. By denying new states the authority to issue currency—that power was given exclusively to a new federal government, which also assumed the colonies’ debts—the Constitution fostered conditions under which antebellum banking institutions would solve the problem of monetary scarcity and, as a result, “dominat[e] money issuers’ agency and knowledge.” Now the currency was created only “when bank officials made loans,” thus limiting participation “to those who could afford to buy shares” (68). So too did banking’s dominance change money users’ relationship to public spending, by supporting “an idea of money as a scarce quantity rather than an enabling institution” (68). Legal redesign of the dollar meant that “there was no conduit that could translate popular demands into public currency creation” (71). And this produced a paradoxical result, in the form of a “populist” critique that only reinforced monetary silencing. Jacksonians laid the blame for inequality on what we would today call “big finance”: a banking and creditor class which, thanks to its virtual monopoly over money creation, “thrive[d] at everyone else’s expense” (61). Meanwhile the promise of currency’s redemption in specie further reinforced the myth that bank paper ultimately had a material store of value standing behind it. The Jacksonian response was to propose a currency that was fully backed by specie, believing that this would diminish banks’ outsized influence and clear the way for unmediated exchange among producers, laborers, and consumers. Finally, the Fed’s multiple restructurings of the financial system, first to mobilize resources for World War I and then in response to the Great Depression, ushered in an era of monetary silencing that, in Feinig’s view, continues to the present. His careful reading of Roosevelt’s actions and public addresses demonstrates how political leadership translated orthodox assumptions about money and its “soundness” to the American public (as well as to the nation’s bankers). Feinig only begins to explore other institutions and arenas that contributed to the era’s silencing. For example, the policy-making process and the debates (academic and political) that informed it helped reconcile a generation of economists and political leaders to New Deal reforms—consolidating the Fed’s powers, codifying the acceptance of Treasuries as collateral—that enhanced dramatically federal power to spur economic activity by issuing debt. Indeed, Feinig starts to venture there in a suggestive read of the counsel provided by some of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisors (129). And so, a deeper dive into the politics of monetary reform would be welcome throughout Moral Economies, as other roundtable contributors have observed. But that would have produced a much longer and, likely, less accessible book. Feinig’s project is to identify and introduce the long political history of masking money’s constitutional design. And here his focus on presidential rhetoric illustrates quite dramatically the power of political speech to reproduce mythologies about money, its value, and its relationship to public authority.  

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  It is not a coincidence that Feinig’s two categories of “monetary knowledge” line up neatly—in most instances—with the two traditions of Western monetary thought that have for generations provided a baseline for debates over finance. And only one of those traditions recognizes the important distinctions between money issuers and users. In simplest terms, the “moral economies of money” documented here reveal participants’ awareness (to varying degrees) that all modern currencies share the two characteristics—a credit identity and a state identity—emphasized by a body of dissenting work in economics, legal studies, historical sociology, and other fields. This “heterodox” tradition has documented money’s origin in credit issue (simultaneously creating an asset and a liability) and the anchor of its value in state authority (governments name the unit of account and give the currency value by issuing it in forms that are tax receivable; the currency consists of “credits” that can be used to pay obligations to the state and that also, because they are transferable, circulate widely as monetary instruments). And the focus of this scholarship on money’s real-world operations makes the user/issuer distinction and the politics of monetary design as clear as day. It turns out that the actors involved in “moral economies of money” had a similar focus and so mobilized regularly around a complementary reading of the monetary landscape. Feinig is essentially historicizing some of the people and institutions that helped to keep knowledge of money’s real-world operations in public view, despite the continuing efforts to obscure them from that larger public. Meanwhile, historical episodes of monetary silencing have privileged the neoclassical or “orthodox” assumptions that view money as—in the words of many textbooks—a “special type of commodity.” This model rejects or dismisses the documentary record, claiming instead that money evolved from the barter-like exchange of goods and services. Orthodoxy’s imagined money forms are not credits or promises, but rather commodity-like tokens that embody real value, essentially “standing in” for wealth and so making price-setting, the accumulation of wealth, and finally exchange more convenient for both private and public actors. Accordingly, orthodoxy assigns the issuers of these tokens a narrow role: ensuring that a widely-accepted monetary instrument, in a supply sufficient to meet the market’s requirements, remains in circulation. Note that this tradition rests on two defining but un-documentable assumptions, both of which erase money users’ relationship to money creation and thus their political stake in its design. For one, it imagines that all economic actors—money issuers and users alike—spend by effectively passing commodity-like money tokens (or their electronic equivalent) back and forth among themselves. There is no acknowledgment here that every act of monetary issue creates financial assets and financial liabilities. The creditor/debtor relationships foundational to real-world money creation disappear from view. Second, and following logically, orthodoxy describes the instruments created by different institutional “issuers” (governments, banks, and—in their view—even non-bank financial institutions) as functionally indistinguishable from one another. It does not see money’s value and usefulness as dependent on a monetary “hierarchy” that leads, in the final analysis, to an anchor in public authority and tax receivability. In the American financial system, according to this view, Federal Reserve Notes and checking deposits generally perform identical functions. And the dollar-denominated assets created by non-bank financial firms are just another version of this currency. It’s all just “dollars.” The neoclassical tradition “emphasizes functions over relations,” as Feinig notes, and so disguises money’s complicated history and attributes (10). Hence it should not be surprising that defenders of creditors’ (particularly banks’) interests have reliably stood by narratives and institutions that help to mask monetary design and so protect privileges awarded to those with a more favorable perch in the monetary hierarchy. Insistence upon the irrelevance of monetary design “silences” money users and issuers alike by disguising the benefits afforded the latter. “When silencing is successful, monetary design and its stakes disappear from view” (9). Moral Economies of Money shows us that past varieties of American money permitted users to unpack its design, recognize its biases, and demand adjustments. Core heterodox insights into money were once common-sense knowledge in part because its design was legible. Alternatively, there have been long stretches of time—including our own—when its illegibility has reinforced a mythical story about money’s neutral, commodity-like nature. By hiding users’ real-world relationship to the circulating credits that animate American finance, critics of heterodoxy have successfully cast efforts to alter its design as misguided or futile. Feinig shows us that familiar episodes of conflict over financial experimentation have been and continue to be battles among interest groups over the definition and design of money itself. That makes Moral Economies of Money a valuable tool for introducing the heterodox critique to multiple audiences, including academic ones. Feinig’s readers literally watch an assortment of American critics decipher money’s origins and functions in real time. The book’s explanatory power was on display for me last fall when I assigned it in a seminar, “American Money,” where undergraduates scrutinize the orthodox/heterodox debate in light of money’s well-documented 4,000-year history. For years now and without exception, class participants have concluded that monetary orthodoxy (a view that most are learning, at the same time, in their economics and finance courses) is wanting for evidence. But not until I had the privilege of adding Moral Economies to the syllabus did I see students grasp that they were participating in a generations-old debate. They recognized the repeated efforts of money issuers and American elites to defend or reassert the “commodity” view. They saw that the work of combating the “silencing” power of monetary orthodoxy has been going on for centuries, and so came to see contemporary heterodox work as part of a well-established dissenting tradition. Students were quick to discover that they are joining in a longstanding intellectual and political effort to make money’s design visible—in the academy, among policymakers, and more broadly in American political culture. Feinig’s elegant intervention makes that history unmistakable. Return to Jakob Feinig: Moral Economies of Money symposium prompt.