Abstract
In the backdrop of the financial crisis of 2008 and the rise of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, social scientists have begun to revisit the fundamental key concepts which explain our social and economic life, whether it is the recent revival in economic inequality in the writing of Thomas Piketty or sociologists’ call to bring back the focus of class analysis on the top of economy or it is Goran Therborn’s thought provoking work on ‘Killing Fields of Inequality’. All these instances refocus on the present social and economic crises which bear moral implications on our life.
Nigel Dodd’s theoretically sophisticated work The Social Life of Money, as the title suggests, is another such attempt to locate a sociological analysis in the heart of everyday issues—money being the most significant of them. ‘Is money a process or a thing (p. 6)?’ ‘Can money be seen as claim on society (p. 7) and what are those bases?’ ‘Can we improve our society by coming up [with] something called an ideal form of money (p. 9)’? These are some of the key questions that Nigel Dodd raises in his extraordinary analytical work. This book, neatly divided in eight chapters, maps the role of money in our social, political, economic and moral life worlds. Lucid in writing style and charged with theoretical debates in sociology, this work motivates the reader to break away with the way we have been habitually thinking about money. Each chapter is devoted to broaden our horizon about our theoretical understanding and practical relationship with money. Travelling along with the classic writings of Georg Simmel, Keynes, Karl Marx and Nietzsche, Nigel Dodd sharpens our analytical visions about money and asserts that more than ‘a material thing’, money is a social ‘process’ which is embedded in our social and political life. From the very beginning, Dodd makes it explicitly clear that this work is interested in discussing the ‘normative implications’ of money; in other words, how do we better our societies via better organisation of money (p. 7).
In the first chapter on the ‘origins’ of money, Dodd revisits the philosophical roots of the notions of money via ‘exchange’, ‘barter’, ‘quantification’, ‘mana’, ‘violence’, etc. He describes five ‘origin-myths’ not with the aim of bursting them once and for all, rather he mirrors them with the empirical evidences on the one hand and the theoretical critics on the other, to show the usefulness of the variety of monetary imaginations. Especially important is his analytical discussion of the thoughts of Simmel and Mauss on money. While Simmel is concerned about the emergence of the economic world via his concepts of value, which is an outcome of exchange (which entails a mutual sacrifice), Mauss is, on the other hand, deeply conscious of highlighting money as a total social fact, that it is much more than a commodity, it is an idea, a faith. Mauss’s larger aim has been to dismantle the binary of traditional and modern, and to show the reciprocity and moral integration as crucial elements to formulate the theory of money. Along with both of these classic theorists, Dodd’s plan is to engage with diverse theoretical imaginations on money, such as the linguistic conception of money as worked out in the writings of Parsons, Baudrillard, De Saussure and Goux.
The second chapter is about constructing a theory of money as capital and explaining the ways through which Marxists such as Lenin, Luxemburg and Harvey have further expanded Marx’s thoughts on money, credit money and finance capital. In this chapter, Dodd aims to diversify social scientists’ renewed interest in Marx’s writings (post-2008 crisis) which is limited to social class and inequality. One of the major concern of Marx was to show that money is not just a material entity but a ‘social relation’ and to arrive at this understanding, Dodd discusses in detail about Marx’s three crucial functions of money: money as a measure of value, as a medium of circulation and as a store of value (pp. 51–52). The reason why Dodd seems to spend a little more time in explaining what Marx has explained about money is that Marx himself criticised earlier theorisations of the origin of money as a barter system or emergence of money through reverence to king or god. Thus, Dodd is sharp enough to bring forth the contradictions in the thought of Marx on money as a means of circulation, and Marx’s dependence on ‘real money’ that is gold base of money in his times. An important point which the discussion in second chapter brings out for us is that how ‘fictitious capital’ (Marx’s term) is important to understand the crisis of capitalism in the 21st century, that is, subprime meltdown. Dodd utilises Marx’s framework (based on social, economic and political conditions) to expand our understanding about money’s role in economic life.
The third chapter focuses on understanding money as a form of debt. Debt forms an important part of contemporary capitalism and particularly how it becomes a negative and acquires mass character. Dodd moves from explaining economic history of debt in human society via the classic work of David Graeber, to reformulate money in relation to the phenomena of debt. While Schumpeter and Keynes were the ones who articulated money as a form of debt, Dodd stresses seeing it in a reverse manner. In other words, how does the phenomenon of debt contribute to the social nature of money, that is, emergence of credit money, the banking system and moral economy of debt across societies? This chapter also connects the story of the crisis of money with the vicious cycles of inflation, debt and the way private risks as well as crisis are made public. It poses a threat to democracies across the world. Not just focusing on the moral dimensions of debt, Dodd brings forth interesting phenomena of increasing public debt, post-financial crisis. It also explains the relationship between debt and state bankruptcy. Broadly, the theme in this chapter is about how the notion of debt reinforces and in turn gets an impetus from the moral economy, and hence provides a significant foundation for socio-economic inequalities and power relations emerging out of money.
Building on the three chapters, the next chapter begins with Nietzsche as an important entry point to the debates of money as guilt and religion. The ideas of Nietzsche on ‘Ubermensch’ and ‘eternal recurrence’ are discussed to formulate a conception of money in which life is not tied to just money but for the celebration of different kinds of ‘associatedness’. To achieve this aim, he travels along with three important thinkers—Simmel, Benjamin and Brown—who have spelled out their (negative) views on money and its impact on an individuals’ life within the capitalist social order. Benjamin’s thoughts of ‘capitalism as form of religion’ imply a creative imagination about how Christian notion of guilt and ‘capitalism’s cultic existence’ can elaborate money as the one which offers constant and relentless pursuit but yet unable to answer questions of ultimate values. Dodd links his ideas on Christianity and capitalism to Brown’s psychoanalysis of civilisation and economics. Brown draws upon Marx and Freud to establish that money is a form which ‘originates from neurosis’. He depicts the analogy between the evolution of humanity and the historical development of (self) repression and its expression in economics, capitalism. Money, thus conceptualised, is also a form of deferred gratification. According to Brown, it is ‘the tendency towards guilt induced self-repression that gives rise to all forms of economic organisation’ (p. 150). While exploring the ‘psycho-religious’ structures of ‘guilt’ which lay beneath the money, this chapter is about human existence, notion of time, morality and the quasi-sacred character of money in our lives.
The fifth chapter delves into the discussion about the potential of money by which society expresses its incapacities, that is, waste. What Dodd has in mind in this chapter is the dominance of the functionalist notion of the ‘utility of money’, and he tries to show how it can be inverted via the critical works of Georges Bataille, Derrida and Baudrillard. Along with discussing the anthropological concept of ‘potlatch’, Dodd interprets money as a form of socially powerful unproductive matter and yet sacred. The reason why money, following Bataille, is to be understood from the perspective of waste is that it homogenises each and every person’s acts, their life-worlds; their very being-ness is reduced to be measured by money. It remains outside the rational world and seen this way money is something which orients life as waste. Similar elements are traced in the writings of Derrida, who sees money as a form of power which changes itself into its opposite; it remains ‘a shadow’, ‘an illusion’ something like ‘betwixt and between’. In other words, money can be seen as empty from within, ab initio. The more fundamental expression to this feature of money is then traced in Baudrillard. For him, money represents the mutation of political economy, where it becomes ‘self-referential’ as the relation between sing and what it signifies has broken, yet another way of perceiving money as (too much) waste.
The important theme in chapter six is about how money expresses itself through social space, geopolitical space, territorial space and the way the notion of territory has undergone huge transformation in post-Fordist regimes. The important question which is asked: is money becoming less national? Spatial configuration of money begins with the state’s role in governance and regulation of economy. It provided historically, after the Westphalia Treaty of 1648, ‘the infrastructure’ (p. 217) through which money’s ‘creditworthiness was institutionalised’ (p. 218) and hence the emergence of ‘territorial money’. The answer Dodd seems to be giving for the question asked above is that money has become increasingly detached from territory, mainly due to the internationalisation of money and financial markets, widespread use of certain currencies such as US dollars and euros; through the creation of money-based spaces such as the Eurozone and lastly with the emergence of digital monies. Here, money via currency marks as a reference to distinguish sovereignty of national states or world regions. He challenges the conventional knowledge about money being tied to national territory via state which produces it, that is, currencies, notes and coins. However, this should not be interpreted as disappearance of geography rather money as a space is disperse, connected and diffuse in nature, indeed, always in flow. This fluidity of money shares is what Dodd attributes to the ‘sociality’ (inspired from Simmel) of money.
Chapter seven is devoted to explore ways in which money matters in our cultural lives. Drawing on the earlier discussions of Simmel on ‘alienation’ and detachment as resulting feature of modern urban life, it also discusses about how creation of monetary regimes such as the Eurozone have an impact on people’s cultural lives. In other words, this chapter elaborates on the relation between money and culture and how they both impact and shape each other. It debates broadly two competing accounts of money and its relation to culture. One, which argues that money has the characteristic of converting quality into quantity and thus impacts cultural systems accordingly (with negative implications as prominent ones in the writings of Marx, Nietzsche and Simmel). While the second view challenges the first narrative and emphasises that money is more than just a quantifier and is located in social and cultural context, hence money should be seen from within as value creator (from Zelizer’s work).
Chapter eight is finally about the utopian dimension of money for human existence. Steering his way out of the debates on whether money should be abolished for its huge negative impact on our lives or it should be reimagined creatively, the author suggests a utopia of money. He builds his ideas on redesigning money for the larger betterment while taking clues from Simmel’s notion of a ‘perfect society’ through ‘unequal pricing’ (p. 325) and Eric Fromm’s call for a ‘humanist utopia’ and others as well. This chapter provides a call for a balanced understanding of the normative and ethical dimensions of money. The future, he suggests, lies in recognising money as a form of multiple possibilities and not a single system, hence a call for monetary pluralism in its various forms.
Finally, a few critical comments on the book. This book would make sense to the reader only when read as a whole, and as shown earlier, each chapter builds on the previous one, thus making it an interesting read. The central thesis of the book lies in asserting while demonstrating through significant categories (as different chapters are woven on those themes) that money should be seen as a social relation, a social process and not as an entity or a thing. To achieve this aim, the author delves into substantial theoretical debates with classical economists, sociologists, philosophers as well as anthropologists. This is also one of the ways through which the author challenges the commonsensical understanding of money. Although there are sections where the author seems to be diverting from the main discussion and further widening the scope of the chapter, and thus sometimes the reader gets lost in the thicket of theoretical matrixes. It would have been better had the author also brought some empirical case studies to strengthen his point.
Another important theme which escapes the author’s attention is the phenomena of corruption which affects common people, and it would have been interesting to see how far his understanding of money could have explained its prevalence and changing forms. It would have been better, too, if the author had brought some insights from the works of Richard Sennett to provide an understanding on the relation between money and self, its impact on character and the functioning of organisations that have undergone significant shifts within the era of financialisation.
Lastly, this book should attract the attention of all those who want to understand the dynamics of economic crises, cultural shifts, post-national framework of capitalism as well as how far our social lives are intertwined with ‘the money’.