I’m excited to comment on The Moral Economies of Money, which details what I would classify as the presence of democratic and partisan contestation over currency during the long 19th century and its disappearance during the New Deal period. Let me start by noting that the book’s big picture setup is inherently compelling. Insofar as historical sociology is presentist, the conventional setup is to look back in time either to better understand the origins of the present or to analyze scenarios that are analogous to our own—we might study public health responses to the influenza pandemic to better understand what happened during Covid, for instance. Feinig’s book does the opposite and looks back to note a presence that is now an absence, which nicely highlights present political opportunities not taken, cracks in the social order where new political coalitions could form, and the like—and the language of the introduction and conclusion is suitably ambitious and suggests that the 19th century is useful to think with as we contemplate the political present. I’m happy to have this provocation and have thoughts along these lines.
But first, let me say a few words of praise about the meaty historical analysis of the book. One of the hallmarks of good historical sociology is that it leads us to see the periods we think we know in a new light. The book does that in so many ways, both big and small. On a theoretical level, the moral economies concept is compelling in that it focuses attention on rock-bottom truths about the economy and money: at base, the issue is a power relation wherein one person extracts goods and services out of another who would not voluntarily give them. We all sort of know this. But analysis of historical periods when species was unavailable drives this point home. In the absence of currency during the 17th and 18th century, for example, European colonists were forced to obtain credit from a single merchant, who could then use dependency to foist unwanted goods on them, limit their mobility, and otherwise coerce them. Likewise, absence of currency forced colonists who needed to pay taxes to perform undesirable tasks, like build roads or hunt wolves.
There are many such Aha moments in the book besides. In various ways, the book shows how the politics of money were inseparable from the development of American statecraft, democracy, white supremacy, and patriarchy. The book establishes in vivid detail how the American ideal of an independent producer was unachievable without public expenditure, because public debt certificates often constituted the sole medium of exchange on the frontier and because it was acceptance of a currency to pay taxes that made it a universal medium of exchange. It was illuminating to learn that part of the European colonists’ motivation for subjugating the native American population was the establishment of various rules, fines, and fees that extracted trinkets from them that served as colonial currency. It was also illuminating to read about how, later in the 19th century, demands for a national currency opened the door to new political coalitions, for instance between white farmers and black Republicans who, for different reasons, had an interest in making it easier to repay debts.
At the same time, however, I sometimes found myself wondering about missed connections between these chapters and other arguments in historical and political sociology—and I say this with an eye to taking up the book’s provocation to use these case studies to make sense of the present. In particular, I wonder if it would have been useful for Jakob to say something a bit more systematic about the relationship between the politics of money and four other issues: land, crisis, political articulation, and populism.
First off, what about land and crisis? Here, I’m particularly thinking about Sarah Quinn’s book American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation, which convincingly narrates 19th-century American political development as primarily revolving around the politics of land: expropriating it from Native Americans, supplying it to white Europeans, creating credit markets that allowed people to develop it, and so on. This was closely tied to major financial crises, of which there was one every ten to fifteen years during the 19th century as government efforts to promote land development fueled various kinds of speculative bubbles. These events occasionally pop up in the narrative, but not in any systematic way. I wonder if this is a missed opportunity to say something systematic about the sorts of land problems or financial crises that make contestation over money especially topical.
Likewise, what about party politics and political articulation? From the narrative, it seems evident that money becomes topical when a political party—or an aspiring political party—engages in a project that articulates its supply as synonymous with a particular social cleavage (for instance, as constitutive of the division between productive and unproductive citizens during the Jacksonian era and after). Moreover, many of these articulations are populist, in the sense that they establish equivalence between very different sectors of society against a nefarious force—for instance, black Republicans and white midwestern farmers. Can we say something more systematic here? Is it just that money becomes topical when it gets incorporated into a particular political project, or are there scope conditions or scenarios in which this is more or less likely to happen?
That brings me to the take-home message of the book, which is that the New Deal successfully silenced contestation over money. On the one hand, the argument is smart: in the first instance, the New Deal divided fiscal and monetary policy in ways that made it possible to consider the two as distinct, then silenced the latter. Let me push on that argument in two ways, though. I would ask, first, why contestation over currency as such matters as opposed to, for instance, contestation over the money supply—or, for that matter, generous welfare transfers to citizens. Why does contestation over currency actually matter?
That is to say that people have a lot to say today about monetary policy and the actions of the Federal Reserve. This is especially evident now that there are visible tradeoffs between bringing down inflation and hamstringing economic activity, and though I appreciate that the book was written before, I think it’s always been the case that the public thinks about central bankers as sort of unelected political-economic overlords. And there’s no shortage of wonks and journalists out there who routinely debate what the Fed should have done or should do differently. What seems different now is that no mainstream political actors—and not even fringy mainstream actors—articulate these debates as synonymous with a partisan cleavage nor especially a populist cleavage.
I think that the book wants to say that there is something deeper at work here: that debating monetary policy is not the same thing as debating creation of new kinds of money. But I have to confess that I’m not entirely sure why. That is, I see that the two are different in kind, but not the consequences for the capacity of different people to articulate new political coalitions or even for people’s lived experience. What really is the difference between the government sending every American a $5,000 check versus the Federal Reserve using various levers to lower the costs of borrowing versus the Treasury issuing a bunch of Greenbacks? If money is ultimately about who has the power to extract what from whom, then aren’t all these policy decisions just different roads to the same ends, around which political coalitions could mobilize? What’s being silenced and how does this silencing foreclose certain political opportunities or options? Is it that certain political strategies or goals are socially unthinkable, outside of mainstream policy debates, or in policy debates but de-aligned with partisan political projects? These seem like important distinctions, and clearly making them will do even more to deliver on the book’s many promising arguments for understanding our political present.
Return to Jakob Feinig: Moral Economies of Money symposium prompt.