Moral Economies of Money is surely one of the most engaging works by a contemporary sociologist on the most curious commodity of them all. Once upon a time (specifically before Jackson, and then between the Civil War and the 1930s), Americans participated in fiery public debates about monetary design (not policy) and organized themselves politically in the pursuit of egalitarian (or, at least, alternative) modes of creating and distributing money. Why did the once-lively politics of money become a democratic void?

In pursuit of answers, Moral Economies formulates money and monetary design theoretically, traces monetary politics’ ebbs and flows, and asks why, since the 1930s, there emerged “monetary silencing”—that is, a “disconnect between money creation and public knowledge about it” (2). The result is part analysis and part political-pedagogical intervention. Both are valuable but, as I shall argue below, the book succeeds more in the latter sense than in the former.

Among the book’s successes is a crisp conceptual framework. Feinig summarizes in a highly accessible way the basics of neo-chartalist-cum-MMT theories of money: “money issuers” and “money users” distinguished, respectively, by absence versus presence of revenue constraint; money’s multiplicity and hierarchies therein; the centrality of taxation as the primary force that, by defining which money can be used to pay the government, transforms a certain type of money into a dominant currency. The ontological position that money is historical, relational, constructed, political, and manipulable has the virtue of being reality-based, for instance, from the perspective of the Fed—representatives of which openly acknowledge the institution’s unlimited ability to produce dollars (3). Feinig then identifies the object of explanation: “moral economies of money” (hereafter MEMs), defined as knowledge and practices that enable people to shape money creation—and the rise, in MEMs’ place, of monetary silence. Where there is silencing, there is also privilege: where private banks are empowered to create money and allocate credit, profit-seeking takes precedence over democratic demands (1-2, 5).

The clarity and concision of Moral Economies makes the enigmatic into something knowable, teachable, and politicizeable—the value of which will be immediately clear to those who, from classroom experience, know the phenomenon of monetary silence all too well. Students, in my experience, may be able to give a textbook definition of money (it’s a means of exchange; it’s a store of value), but thinking beyond that is entirely another matter. Money exists all around us, and yet it defies historical imagination and nullifies personal experience. Readings on debt and credit are too easily read as accounts of processes ‘out there’; we can describe money’s natural realities and prescribe “financial literacy,” but the cultivation of critical insight is a tough sell. Moral Economies, thankfully, pushes against money’s dead-ending tendencies as a means of critical pedagogy.

Helpful, also, is Feinig’s Zelizerian framing of money in moral terms—that is, highlighting the fundamentally moral and relational nature of what cash is issued against, and thus what (or who) is valuable and powerful. Issuance against real estate values land and empowers landowners; issuance against a precious metal empowers holders of the metal; issuance against labor empowers workers. Here we find a language for considering, for instance, the moral insult that is austerity politics, which rests not only on a depoliticization of money and the empowerment of bondholders and lenders, but also an inherently moral valuation of creditors over citizens.

Among the most intriguing theme of Moral Economies is its emphasis on what physical money, its materiality and design, communicates (or not). “Democratic” money talks: it tells people what’s behind it, who made it, and what its purpose is. Moral Economies reminds us that physical monies can communicate, and indeed have communicated, their origins and underpinnings. It reminds us likewise that sometimes money stops talking. Maybe it’s because certain people or professions claim an exclusive right to speak for it, or a libertarian social movement generates an anti-democratic money using technologies that only a select few can access. And so monetary silencing has a double character; it occurs when people don’t think they can speak for money and money doesn’t speak for itself.

There is more praise I could heap on Moral Economies—but, for discussion’s sake, I’ll turn to some critical food for thought. Inevitably perhaps, a book seeking to impose a tidy conceptual framing on an untidy topic raises both theoretical doubts and analytical “what abouts”—some internal to the work, some noticeable by omission.

In the former category is a phantom concept of the state, which figures prominently in initial discussions of money’s origins and ordering—in discussions of the roles of war-making and taxation, in particular—but is not theorized head-on. In the empirical chapters, the state features in the historical story but is marginal to the analytical account of MEMs. Chapter 4 brings us, for instance, into the MEMs of the 1870s depression and mobilization of Greenbackers, but treats Treasury money as a mere design option rather than a reordering of power within the state and a retooling of the power of the state. Congress, likewise, is a site of debates rather than interests; a whole range of contextual forces shaping the political economy of money—the form, scope, and internal dynamics of the postbellum federal state; its capacity to maintain a military presence in the South; the context of Reconstruction and the racialized politics thereof; internecine battles within the Republican Party under Grant; the shifting balance of partisan power as Confederate states rejoined the Union—feature very little, if at all, as forces shaping monetary politics. The debt situation of the federal state, linked with both internal class politics and geopolitical relations, also appears but then fades out when it comes to analytical significance. New Deal silencing seems, in the end, an effect of FDR’s language and more-or-less visible motivations, with no need to locate FDR in the internal constellations of the New Deal state.

One might have a similar response to Chapter 5, which explores MEMs in the 1890s, contrasting the views of Greenbackers and bimetallist populists with those of northeastern “upper class” Goldbugs. Foregrounding monetary politics’ expressions in broadly distributed cultural forms—song, poetry, and fiction—, we learn about the visions of money’s proper meaning in Barnum’s 1880 The Art of Money-getting and Norton’s 1891 Ten Men of Money Island but, along the way, another analytical specter appears: class politics. Feinig uses the language of class occasionally but then sets it apart from his typology of the “epistemological commitments” of rival camps.  The aim is to grasp “the range of legitimate actions a money user, or groups of money users, could undertake relative to monetary design” (104). But whether the “groups” involved are organized along class lines—and if so, how this matters—one does not discover.

This brings me to a third analytical presence-but-absence: Moral Economies is careful to acknowledge that MEMs may be “democratic” in the sense of expressing the interests and experiences of constituencies, but need not be (and indeed have not been) democratic in the sense of advancing egalitarian politics. Many MEMs in Feinig’s story are not so much centered on a “just” monetary order as they are explicit power-seeking projects of racialized and gendered dispossession. Here, again, one wonders whether a critical revisiting of the “moral economy” concept is in order; there is a need to pre-empt a too-easy slippage between “moral” and “just.”

And finally, a “what about” noticeable by omission: the matter of technology and technological conditions of MEMs versus monetary silencing. Here, returning to the double character of monetary silencing that Feinig insightfully highlights, we might ask: what does a financialized world of digital money flows presented to us as mere numbers on screens mean for possibilities of monetary politics? Would Treasury or Fed money “talk” as a political and designable social thing if its aesthetics differ little from a private bank’s phone app? What, more generally, are the technological conditions of possibility of public knowledge about money and monetary design?

Return to Jakob Feinig: Moral Economies of Money symposium prompt.