Samuel A. Chambers is Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins, co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Political Theory, and is series co-editor of Routledge’s Innovators in Political Theory. He has authored eight books and published three dozen journal articles, along with numerous chapters and essays. He has published three related books on capitalism, money, and political economy: Money Has No Value, Capitalist Economics, and There is No Such Thing as ‘The Economy’.
Zan Boag: When looking at the research that has been conducted into money and wealth, it appears that few academics have studied the topic outside of economics. Not many seem to want to delve into the thorny topic of money.
Samuel Chambers: I’ve basically been trying for 15 years to understand money, and my perspective now is it is impossible to really get your hands around money – gain a palpable grasp on it, be able to explain to other people – if you are studying it from within the specific terms of a particular academic discipline. The short version of this story is that most of those academics – historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, etc. – who are studying phenomena directly related to money usually end up saying, in one way or another: “Well, the specific investigation of money, especially the theory of money, we will leave that to the economists.” However, the economists themselves have simply not had a good explanation or understanding or theory of money. In fact, economists have usually been working with, or more often assuming, some very bad theories of money.
One can adduce many reasons for this, but the basic problem is that Economics has built its entirely disciplinary structure around a certain way of modelling what they think of as ‘the economy’. And so, for more than a hundred years, mainstream economics has simply left money out of their models – excluded it explicitly. If you open an intro ‘econ’ textbook it basically says something like this: “Well, we could think about money this way, but we are describing for our students a model of the economy. And that model can be reduced to the exchange of commodities. The model doesn’t need money! So we exclude it.” Economists have, historically, taken pride in this fact; their model is so elegant it can leave money out.
So, when it comes to money, you have economics not studying it very well, and a lot of other disciplines letting the economists study it – assuming they will be studying it. A theory of money therefore falls through the cracks.
But if there are no disciplinary perspectives that lend themselves to helping us get a proper understanding of money, that greatly increases the burden we face as students of money. That is, in order to study money well, we will need to bring a lot of knowledge and resources to bear. We have to think about relations of power; we have to think about cultural formations; we have to think about the development of social order; and we have to think about very sophisticated and complex money markets.
This last item names a distinct but related wrinkle: money today has gotten really, really complicated. I mean, I spend almost 10 pages in my recent book just trying to explain the mechanics of the repo market in the clearest terms I can. And some readers may read that and say, “Well, why did we even bother?” My answer is a bit banal, but I think important: we need to know how these things work because they are absolutely important to the capitalist societies we all live in. And you can’t just gloss something like repo, or derivatives, in a sentence.
For example, well-meaning journalists will often explain bonds with a phrase like this: “Prices and yields are inversely related, so when prices go up yields go down.” That’s true. But I honestly think that for a lot of
