Questions about the nature of money have gained a new urgency in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Even as many people have less of it, there are more forms and systems of money, from local currencies and social lending to mobile money and Bitcoin. Yet our understanding of what money is—and what it might be—hasn’t kept pace. In The Social Life of Money, Nigel Dodd, one of today’s leading sociologists of money, reformulates the theory of the subject for a postcrisis world in which new kinds of money are proliferating.

What counts as legitimate action by central banks that issue currency and set policy? What underpins the right of nongovernmental actors to create new currencies? And how might new forms of money surpass or subvert government-sanctioned currencies? To answer such questions, The Social Life of Money takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at modern theories of money.

One of the book’s central concerns is how money can be wrested from the domination and mismanagement of banks and governments and restored to its fundamental position as the "claim upon society" described by Georg Simmel. But rather than advancing yet another critique of the state-based monetary system, The Social Life of Money draws out the utopian aspects of money and the ways in which its transformation could in turn transform society, politics, and economics. The book also identifies the contributions of thinkers who have not previously been thought of as monetary theorists—including Nietzsche, Benjamin, Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Derrida, and Hardt and Negri. The result provides new ways of thinking about money that seek not only to understand it but to change it.

Complete with a new preface that discusses recent developments in the evolution of money, the book draws out the ways in which its transformation could in turn radically alter society, politics, and economics.

Nigel Dodd is professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of The Sociology of Money and Social Theory and Modernity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION IX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XVII
INTRODUCTION 1
1 ORIGINS
Barter 17
Tribute 23
Quantification 27
Mana 30
Language 34
Violence 43
Conclusion 46
2 CAPITAL
The Contradictions of Money 51
Credit Money 55
Finance Capital 59
Primitive Accumulation 63
When Credit Fails 66
Behind the Veil 72
Seeing Double 79
Conclusion 87
3 DEBT
Debt`s Untold Story 94
Credit and Nothing but Credit 102
Neochartalism 106
Schumpeter`s Banks 111
Minsky`s Half-Century 117
Strange Money 121
Austerity Myths 126
Conclusion 132
4 GUILT
Übermensch and Eternal Return 136
Capitalism, Debt, and Religion 142
Filthy Lucre 149
Conclusion 158
5 WASTE
Money, Excretion, and Heterogeneous Matter 166
Derrida`s Ghosts 179
Cool Money, Living Money 189
Conclusion 204
6 TERRITORY
Westfailure 216
Nomisma 222
Deterritorialization 226
Empire 237
Euroland 251
Conclusion 266
7 CULTURE
Money and Cultural Alienation 273
Polanyi and the Problem of Embeddedness 278
Relational Monies 286
Scales of Value 294
A Quality Theory of Money 298
Repersonalizing Impersonal Money 305
Conclusion 310
8 UTOPIA
Simmel`s Perfect Money 316
Fromm`s Humanistic Utopia 330
Giving Time for Time 342
Rotting Money 346
Proudhon`s Bank 351
Vires in Numeris 362
Toward a Monetary Commons 372
Conclusion 381
CONCLUSION 385
BIBLIOGRAPHY 395
INDEX 421