Beyond Governance and Prevention

On the Use(s) of Aristotle for Theorizing Money’s Politics

Dados Bibliográficos

ID6350403
AutoresJacob Swanson (0000-0001-9323-9632, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume52
Fascículo4
Páginas605-630
Data de publicação2024-08-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/00905917231204891
OpenAlexW4388499368
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas54

What are the contents, limits, and possibilities of Aristotle’s works for critical thinking about money? Recent scholarship has (re)turned to Aristotle as an authority for two key political approaches to money. The first aims to democratize the governance of monetary institutions in order to realize more just economic outcomes. The second seeks to prevent money, or its inherently deleterious excesses, from corrupting political actors and political life. Arguing that these two approaches are insightful, important, and incomplete, I reengage Aristotle’s account of money across the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics to theorize money as a vital but underexplored means of political subject formation. I illuminate how the use of money produces collective and constitutive relations that emerge by way of people’s engagements and entanglements with the things they produce, acquire, desire, and exchange. Bringing this to light also makes visible, I argue, how Aristotle understands money as something capable of being used to both bring about social justice and to pervasively corrupt the foundations of shared democratic life. Taking stock of this dual capacity of money, I show how money’s relationship to subjectivity simultaneously makes money the site of a seemingly intractable problem for politics under capitalism and the means to revive it and reconnect it to democratic life

Capitalism · Corporate governance · Democracy · Economics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Law and economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Philosophy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory