NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here.
Luke Herrine —
This blog has already hosted several examples of re-thinkings of the nature of money and its relationship to law and power, most recently in a symposium on LPE Contributor Mehrsa Baradaran’s book on money and Black capitalism. This may seem like a niche project that those without an interest in finance can afford to ignore or leave to others. But that would be to ignore a fundamental principle: cash rules everything around us. Especially in capitalist societies, power is channeled through money and vice versa.
And justifications of power rely on mystification about money. If anything can be called the core of the neoliberal project it is the proposition that cash should rule us. Hayek’s foundational argument, after all, is that allocation via the price mechanism is the essence self governance. Making all resources and activities interchangeable with money enables each person to pursue her own version of the good life in a way that interferes with others’ only as much as they consent to while simultaneously directing resources towards their most valuable use (see here for instance). Payment of money is how we each individually express how much we value different resources and how much of others’ interference we are willing to bear. Price is the aggregation of those individual valuations. Money thus serves as the common currency that enables us to commensurate our processes of valuation without deliberating and without forcing anything on anybody else.
But that’s not how money works. Treating money as a neutral arbiter of values that the legal system can simply take for granted is a classic example of “transcendental nonsense“. As with any form of such nonsense, explaining why requires a careful analysis of how law structures money, tracing who has the power to shape that law, and exploring the dialectic relationship between the law, money, and the markets they coordinate. A small but growing group of scholars has been undertaking this task. Many of these scholars have begun to converge in a new international network called the Law and Money Initiative. An overlapping group will also be launching a new site at just-money.org.
Over the next two weeks, we will host a symposium on how close attention to the role of money in law and political economy changes one’s analysis of a whole range of areas of society, with a particular focus on how the legal infrastructure of money shapes areas of non-financial law. The idea is to open up conversations about how power shapes law to conversations about how money and law shape each other, and vice versa.
Join us!
Luke Herrine is a PhD Student at Yale Law School.
