Keith Hart (editor) - Money in a Human Economy

Money in a Human Economy

The Human Economy
Series editors:
Keith Hart, University of Pretoria
John Sharp, University of Pretoria

Those social sciences and humanities concerned with the economy have lost the confidence to challenge the sophistication and public dominance of the field of economics. We need to give a new emphasis and direction to the economic arrangements that people already share, while recognizing that humanity urgently needs new ways of organizing life on the planet. This series examines how human interests are expressed in our unequal world through concrete economic activities and aspirations.

Volume 1
People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis
Perspectives from the Global South
Edited by Keith Hart & John Sharp

Volume 2
Economy For and Against Democracy
Edited by Keith Hart

Volume 3
Gypsy Economy
Romani Livelihoods and Notions of Worth in the 21st Century
Edited by Micol Brazzabeni, Manuela Ivone Cunha and Martin Fotta

Volume 4
From Clans to Coops:
Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily
Theodoros Rakopoulos

Volume 5
Money in a Human Economy
Edited by Keith Hart

Edited by

Keith Hart

Published in 2017 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

2017 2017 Keith Hart

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hart, Keith, editor.

Title: Money in a human economy / edited by Keith Hart.

Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2017. | Series: The human economy ; Volume 5 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017013681 (print) | LCCN 2017021938 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785335600 (eBook) | ISBN 9781785335594 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: MoneyHistory. | Foreign exchange.

Classification: LCC HG231 (ebook) | LCC HG231 .M5864 2017 (print) | DDC 332.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013681

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78533-559-4 (hardback)
EISBN: 978-1-78533-560-0 (ebook)

Contents

Keith Hart

Keith Hart

Jane Guyer

Joseph Noko

Noam Yuran

Supriya Singh

David Pedersen

Horacio Ortiz

Bill Maurer

Nigel Dodd

Marina Martin

Sean Maliehe

Hadrien Saiag

Federico Neiburg

Part I

Introduction

Introduction

Money in a Human Economy

KEITH HART

This book is the third in a series of volumes (Hart and Sharp 2014; Hart 2015) exploring the idea of a human economy as a way of thinking about a better world. These first two chapters explore the tension between money as a human universal and its historical manifestation as capitalism. Inevitably, conceiving of money in abstract and general terms lends a more benign perspective to it, whereas capitalism offers a more divisive and critical perspective. Our aim is not to choose one over the othera move that is commonplace in ideological conceptions of moneybut rather to keep a dialectical focus on both poles, to keep two ideas in our head at once. For if any topic resists reductive treatment, moneys essence lies in movement between the extremes that constitute its character.

We tend to think of money as one thing, akin to the national monopoly currency we are familiar with. It is the same with theories of money. Most people stick with their favorite, to the exclusion of all others. But this monolithic assumption concerning money is losing its power in our time. Singular conceptions of money are giving way to plural versions not just of money but of the kinds of society that it supports. This raises the question of how our various concrete examples relate to money, whatever that may be.

We could make of money an analytical construct with some pretension to being moneydebt, for example. But then money as the object of our common inquiries would be lost. Once we accept that many thousands of social things can be money, the pursuit of a solid middle ground becomes increasingly implausible. We must admit therefore that each case bites off a chunk of money that combines general and particular dimensions of the enquiry that we share. We must then add the historical complexity of modern money, which is global in scope and goes by the name of capitalism. Finally, as our title indicates, we do have an analytical take on moneyits place in something we call a human economy. This is what readers will get from this book: a wide-ranging and open-ended set of particular inquiries into money as a feature of the human economy. It doesnt get more specific than that.

Money is, with language, one of humanitys two great means of communication. Take a look again at the preceding paragraphs and substitute language for every incidence of money. The presumption of unity in the case of money is replaced by one of diversity. This is our method. We take something assumed to be generically the same and explore its diversity.

For many, the idea of money in a human economy makes no sense, for what could be more inhuman than money? On the whole, money gets a bad press. Why? For thousands of years property in money fought property in land, and most often the latter was politically dominant (Hann and Hart 2011; Hart and Sharp 2014). Markets and money were denigrated as antisocial elements in economic texts written by supporters of the military-agrarian complex. The poor have had little love for the rich through the ages and several world religions make a point of stressing this. The idea has entered the modern era in the form of socialist or communist thinking, most strikingly in the Soviet anti-market economy inaugurated by the Bolshevik revolution and later by Maos Cultural Revolution. There have also been countless utopian experiments that were aimed at making money marginal to their societies. Intellectuals habitually join this chorus, as they have little money and resent having less public influence than those who do have it. The popular saying money is the root of all evil has deep cultural resonance, both ancient and modern. Finallyand less pejorativelymoney was an impersonal instrument and therefore, in a way, inhuman. It had to be impersonal in order to reach people faraway whom the sender didnt know and so it stood for the opposite of humanity, even as it served wider human purposes.

In order to identify moneys human side, we must decide what an economy is. Is it a species of rationalism, as the economists claim, or a social object as featured nightly on the national news? It is both, a subject-object relationship that takes the form of a strategy meant to guide the behavior of a class opposed to other classes. Thus the Greek military aristocracy fought the great trading cities in the name of