This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In Britain, substantial cuts in police budgets alongside controversial handling of incidents such as politically sensitive enquiries, public disorder and relations with the media have recently triggered much debate about public knowledge and trust in the police. To date, however, little academic research has investigated how knowledge of police performance impacts citizens’ trust. We address this long-standing lacuna by exploring citizens’ trust before and after exposure to real performance data in the context of a British police force. The results reveal (...) that being informed of performance data affects citizens’ trust significantly. Furthermore, direction and degree of change in trust are related to variations across the different elements of the reported performance criteria. Interestingly, the volatility of citizens’ trust is related to initial performance perceptions, and citizens’ intentions to support the police do not always correlate with their cognitive and affective trust towards the police. In discussing our findings, we explore the implications of how being transparent with performance data can both hinder and be helpful in developing citizens’ trust towards a public organisation such as the police. From our study, we pose a number of ethical challenges that practitioners face when deciding what data to highlight, to whom, and for what purpose. (shrink)

Although Karl Polanyi is best known for his theorization of market regulation and the double movement, democratizing the economic was one of his core concerns. He believed societies need to bring labor, land, and money under collective oversight to displace the logic of market fundamentalism with the logic of human needs. In this article, the author draws on Polanyi’s vocabulary to shed light on the denial of money politics and the possibility of democratization. The author illustrates these (...) dynamics through an analysis of long-term dynamics of (de)politicization in British colonial America and the United States through the 1930s. The author developed this approach hoping that it can contribute to nudging public debates beyond regulation and monetary policy techniques and toward popular involvement and knowledge. (shrink)

This article argues that major cases of electoral reform across democracies in Asia in recent years can be explained as institutional measures aimed at curbing corruption and . More specifically, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand rid themselves of their extreme candidate-centered electoral systems as a means to encourage politicians to invest in collective party labels, while Indonesia discarded its extremely party-centered electoral system to increase the accountability of individual politicians. The article thus disagrees with scholars who argue that recent electoral reform (...) should be understood as part of a wider project by Asian governments to engineer a majoritarian form of democracy. Instead, the comparative analysis shows that democracies across Asia, in line with global trends in institutional design, have been their electoral systems, moving them closer towards the ideal of electoral. (shrink)

How was the Neoplatonic School of Athens able to maintain itself for more than a century at Athens, in a hostile environment, while being the target of the opposition of the Christians who were not only in the majority, but also held political power? These are the questions this text seeks to answer. Although it does not promise any earth-shaking discovery, it will try to sketch a clear and precise portrait of the Neoplatonic School of Athens on the family, political (...) and economic level. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1985, presents a key collection of essays on Berkeley's moral and political philosophy. They form an introduction to, and analysis of, Berkeley's immaterialist arguments, part of his consciously adopted strategy to subvert Enlightenment thought, which he saw as a danger to civil society.

In Politics, Money, and Persuasion, distinguished philosopher John Russon offers a new framework for interpreting Plato's The Republic. For Russon, Plato's work is about the distinctive nature of what it is to be a human being and, correspondingly, what is distinctive about the nature of human society. Russon focuses on the realities of our everyday experience to come to profoundly insightful assessments of our human realities: the nature of the city, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of (...) human psychology. Russon's argument concentrates on the ambivalence of logos, which includes reflections on politics and philosophy and their place in human life, how humans have shaped the environment, our interactions with money, the economy, and taking account, and the pursuit of the good in social and political systems. Politics, Money, and Persuasion offers a deeply personal but also practical kind of philosophical reading of Plato's classic text. It emphasizes the tight connection between the life of city and the life of the soul, demonstrating both the crucial role that human cognitive excellence and psychological health play in political and social life. (shrink)

The ability of very wealthy individuals (or, as I will call them, the ‘super-rich’) to turn their economic power into political power has been—and remains—an important cause of political inequality. In response, this paper advocates an original solution. Rather than solving the problem through implementing a comprehensive conception of political equality, or through enforcing complex rules about financial disclosure etc., I argue that we should impose a choice on the super-rich. The super-rich must choose between (i) forfeiting the things that (...) make them super-rich, i.e., pay a 100 % tax on their wealth above a certain level, or, (ii) they must forfeit some of their political rights. These rights include entitlements to fund political parties; to stand for office; and to work or volunteer for political parties. The right to vote, though, is not limited. I defend my proposal against non-consequentialist and consequentialist objections. I also argue that it avoids two problems that many attempts to reduce political inequality face; these are the political egalitarian’s dilemma and the problem of political equality’s relative moral importance. (shrink)

Astonishment that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. It is not the beginning of any insight, unless it is that the idea of history from which it comes is untenable.And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?In 1940 the exiled German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin warned that fidelity to a vision of history as (...) progress risked normalizing the remy-thologization of politics.1 Recent events have underlined the urgency, both for thought and for action, of rejecting the same unphilosophical astonishment in our own time. In the face of political... (shrink)

Political philosophy harbors two schools of thought concerning money: the liberal, which regards it as a facilitator for freedom and enterprise, and the socialist/anarchist, which condemns it. liberal accounts of money and left-wing critiques (including those of marx and simmel) are analyzed. the role of money in promoting distributive justice is discussed using four models of money-free society. it is shown that money is pivotal in facilitating social justice based on substantive equality.

Money performs its economic functions best when its value remains stable over time. This Article explores how that desideratum was achieved, or not achieved, under five identifiable monetary regimes in economic history. Transitions from one regime to another resulted from the demands of economic growth, which some regimes met better than others. The modern fiat money regime is optimal in most economic respects. Whatever amount of money needed to accommodate growth can be supplied at minimal costs. But (...) political control over money creation can be used to increase the short-term control over economic resources of those in power and their constituents. When such debasements of money have occurred, the political economy of every regime interfered with achieving optimal long-term economic outcomes by unleashing inflation. How might the modern fiat money regime avoid that result? (shrink)

The point, for the 946,326th time is that people get elected to office by currying the favor of powerful interest groups. They don’t get elected for their excellence as political philosophers.Congress has consistently failed to solve some serious problems with the cost, effectiveness, and safety of pharmaceuticals. In part, this failure results from the pharmaceutical industry convincing legislators to define policy problems in ways that protect industry profits. By targeting campaign contributions to influential legislators and by providing them with selective (...) information, the industry manages to displace the public’s voice in developing pharmaceutical policy. (shrink)

Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of (...) money, drawing on the insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money. (shrink)

Why, when confronted with policy alternatives that could improve patient care, public health, and the economy, does Congress neglect those goals and tailor legislation to suit the interests of pharmaceutical corporations? In brief, for generations, the pharmaceutical industry has convinced legislators to define policy problems in ways that protect its profit margin. It reinforces this framework by selectively providing information and by targeting campaign contributions to influential legislators and allies. In this way, the industry displaces the public's voice in developing (...) pharmaceutical policy. Unless citizens mobilize to confront the political power of pharmaceutical firms, objectionable industry practices and public policy will not change. Yet we need to refine this analysis. I propose a research agenda to uncover pharmaceutical influence. It develops the theory of dependence corruption to explain how the pharmaceutical industry is able to deflect the broader interests of the general public. It includes empirical studies of lobbying and campaign finance to uncover the means drug firms use to: (1) shape the policy framework adopted and information used to analyze policy; (2) subsidize the work of political allies; and (3) influence congressional voting. (shrink)

At the present historical moment, the modernization of the Greek nation is at the forefront of discussion in the Greek public sphere. In the shadow of this discussion, the official public sphere has also been grappling with a very low national birth rate - approximately 100,000 per population of 11 million. This statistical phenomenon is coupled with a high frequency of abortion, between 150,000 and 200,000 in 2001, and is referred to in the media and policy discussions as `the demografiko', (...) Greece's `No. 1 or No. 2 national problem'. This article examines popular Greek perceptions of the problem of the national birth rate and the contestation between meanings of nationhood that the resulting discourses both illuminate and, as the author shows, sometimes incite. The focus is on what women living in Athens say about the demografiko. These are voices not currently being heard in the public sphere. The author argues that the demografiko's articulation of `Greece' is a window through which one witnesses the racially and religiously inflected politics of late modernity, just as they are also being played out at the site of gender and reproduction elsewhere in Europe and Asia. (shrink)

It is well known that the concept of play is employed on a cosmic scale as an explanatory device in certain quarters of classical Indian metaphysics. What is less well known is that in the theory of drama, which explicitly appeals to this ‘playelement’ in the human imagination, the tension and play between different competing rasas is made a requirement of good theater: na hy ekarasajaṃ kāvyam kiṃcid asti — “from one rasa alone, no artwork can be,” says Bharata.1 In (...) other words, there can be no play without contradiction. What is even less widely known is that one of the most frequently staged and widely commented upon Sanskrit plays, Śūdraka’s Little Clay Cart, combines.. (shrink)

This essay examines Hume’s treatment of money in light of his view of the imagination. It begins with his claim that money is distinct from wealth, the latter arising, according to vulgar reasoning, from the power of acquisition that it represents, or, understood philosophically, from the labor that produces it. The salient features that Hume identifies with the imagination are then put forth, namely its power to combine ideas creatively and the principle of easy transition that characterizes its (...) movement among them. Two issues that these features explain are then discussed: first, why people take value to lie in the material of which money is made, and, second, why they assign value to what they take money to represent, namely, wealth. In both cases, the imagination creates a new relation, an illusion or fiction, that cannot be traced directly to experience. In the case of money, the faculty conjoins what is intangible (the power of acquisition) with the physical qualities of specie; in the case of property it produces a causal relation that connects persons with objects to constitute stable possession that constitutes ownership. Hume also appeals to the imagination to explain the rules of property that subsequently develop (present possession, occupation, prescription, and transference). The essay concludes by emphasizing that being based on the imagination is not in itself indicative of any instability in either money or property and the practices they enshrine, a feature they share with other phenomena (such as the self and continued existence) that Hume also traces to the same faculty. (shrink)

Money in Asia : Small Currencies in Social and Political Contexts. Edited by Jane Kate Leonard and Ulrich Theobald. Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900, vol. 6. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. l + 522. €180, $234.

It is no exaggeration to say that American health policy is frequently subordinated to budgetary policies and procedures. The Affordable Care Act was undeniably ambitious, reaching health care services and underlying health as well as health insurance. Yet fiscal politics determined the ACA’s design and guided its implementation, as well as sometimes assisting and sometimes constraining efforts to repeal or replace it. In particular, the ACA’s vulnerability to litigation has been the price its drafters paid in exchange for fiscal-political (...) acceptability. Future health care reformers should consider whether the nation is well served by perpetuating such an artificial relationship between financial commitments and health returns. (shrink)

Medieval coin plays an essential role in the imagined history of money: it figures as the primal "commodity money" — a natural medium, spontaneously adopted by parties in exchange who converge upon a metal like silver to represent the value of other goods. As a natural medium with a price objectively established through trade, commodity money appears to offer an independent means of measure in the market. But as the history offered here reveals, medieval money was (...) nothing like its imagined alternative. England’s early coin became a medium when the government began to spend and tax in that unit of account, took coin as a mode of payment, and allowed it to be transferred between people in the meantime. Individuals participated in the arrangement, paying for coin in exchange for the unique quality — liquidity — that set money apart from a commodity. That quality was orchestrated by the very channels that brought public and private together in the project of making a medium. In fact, insofar as the English equated money with the commodity it contained, they engineered instability into the heart of their medium. Depreciating coin — diluting its commodity content — offered a cure. It also confirmed that coin had never been the "commodity money" imagined in later accounts. Coin was, instead, a constitutional medium, one that related the government to its participants and thus helped to configure the world it appeared merely to measure. (shrink)

Deliberation and democratic legitimacy -- Moral pluralism and political consensus -- Associations and democracy (with Joel Rogers) -- Freedom of expression -- Procedure and substance in deliberative democracy -- Directly-deliberative polyarchy (with Charles Sabel) -- Democracy and liberty -- Money, politics, political equality -- Privacy, pluralism, and democracy -- Reflections on deliberative democracy -- Truth and public reason.

In this article, we describe what cryptocurrency is, how it works, and how it relates to familiar conceptions of and questions about money. We then show how normative questions about monetary policy find new expression in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These questions can play a role in addressing not just what money is, but what it should be. A guiding theme in our discussion is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely (...) technical results of disciplines like computer science and economics. Note: this article is the first entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

Taking the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as its subject, this book breaks new ground in focusing its lens on a little-studied aspect of Hume's thinking: his understanding of money. George Caffentzis makes both an intervention in the field of monetary philosophy and into Marxian conceptions of the relation between philosophy and capitalist development. He vividly charts the ways in which Hume's philosophy directly informed the project of 'civilizing' the people of the Scottish Highlands and pacifying the English proletariat (...) in response to the revolts of both groups at the heart of the empire. Built on careful historical and philosophical detective work, Civilizing Money offers a stimulating and radical political reading of the ways in which Hume's fundamental philosophical claims performed concrete political functions. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The special links between money and history transcend that routine course of events with which are associated the great - majority of the works of mankind. It is rare to come across articles that since their initial manufacture have preserved their form almost intact for twenty-five centuries, and thus for almost the entire historical span of the civilized world, while playing an identical role in the lives of societies as diverse as those of Europe and the whole of Asia. (...) It is rare, furthermore, to find articles that are of such generalized use and interest, often even the source of common feelings. Finally, similar articles are rare, if they exist at all, which—as is the case with money—may be just as closely connected with the great currents of the political, economic and social history of entire nations and continents as with the personal fates of individuals and families: in other words, articles whose presence might equally well record the succession of epochs as the passage of days. (shrink)

Some leading economists maintain that corporate managers have no social responsibilities other than to maximize profits and obey the law. To support that thesis, they rely, in part, on the agency theory of the firm. The theory provides that managers are agents of shareholders and must do what shareholders want, which is generally to make as much money as possible. For purposes of this article, I accept that managers are agents of shareholders, but I reject the conclusion that the (...) relationship dilutes their moral obligations. Managers, as agents, cannot justify immoral decisions on the grounds that their shareholders direct their actions. Similarly, shareholders, as principals, lack moral bases to authorize managers to take actions the shareholders could not justify taking themselves. I apply this thesis to the ethical challenges managers of government contracting businesses face when they consider whether to make independent political expenditures. I argue that where it is in the interests of government contractors to publicly disclose, limit, or forego making independent political expenditures, they can legally do so, and that in the absence of financial advantage or legal obligation, agency theory highlights the ethical obligations of shareholders and their managers agents. It does not grant them an ethical free pass. (shrink)

Some leading economists maintain that corporate managers have no social responsibilities other than to maximize profits and obey the law. To support that thesis, they rely, in part, on the agency theory of the firm. The theory provides that managers are agents of shareholders and must do what shareholders want, which is generally to make as much money as possible. For purposes of this article, I accept that managers are agents of shareholders, but I reject the conclusion that the (...) relationship dilutes their moral obligations. Managers, as agents, cannot justify immoral decisions on the grounds that their shareholders direct their actions. Similarly, shareholders, as principals, lack moral bases to authorize managers to take actions the shareholders could not justify taking themselves. I apply this thesis to the ethical challenges managers of government contracting businesses face when they consider whether to make independent political expenditures. I argue that where it is in the interests of government contractors to publicly disclose, limit, or forego making independent political expenditures, they can legally do so, and that in the absence of financial advantage or legal obligation, agency theory highlights the ethical obligations of shareholders and their managers agents. It does not grant them an ethical free pass. (shrink)

Theories of justice rely on a variety of criteria to determine what social arrangements should be considered just. For most theories, the distribution of financial resources matters. However, they take the existence of money as a given and tend to ignore the way in which the creation of money impacts distributive justice. Those with access to collateral are favoured in the creation of credit or debt, which represents the main form of money today. Appealing to the idea (...) that access to credit confers freedom, and that inequalities in this freedom are morally arbitrary, this article shows how the advantage to those with collateral plays out in different ways in today’s economy. The article identifies several forms of bias inherent in money creation, and its subsequent destruction: loans from commercial banks to individuals and corporations, interbank lending, lending from central banks to commercial banks, and selective bail-outs by central banks. These are not mere inequalities: they are unjust since alternative designs of the financial architecture exist that would significantly reduce them. The paper focuses on one possible reform with the potential to address several of the types of bias identified, namely the separation of money creation from private bank credit. (shrink)

This essay responds to “Money as Art: The Form, the Material, and Capital” by the Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas with refer-ence to the triple manifestation of crisis in the United States dur-ing the spring months of 2020. By triangulating the role of money in the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing mass unemployment, and the historical nationwide revolt in response to the police mur-der of George Floyd predicated on a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, Nicholas Huber makes a three-part claim. First, that (...) acceptance of the Marxist theory of fetishism forecloses the possibility of conceiv-ing of capitalist money as art in the sense developed by Lapavitsas, insofar as the latter tends toward transhistorical concepts of both art and money. Following from this, any aesthetic function of mon-ey in the capitalist mode of production is inseparable from its total social function; that is, capitalist money is at once an economic, political, cultural, and aesthetic mediation unlike any other. Finally, Huber draws on Louis Marin’s typology of the frame in correspond-ence with Erik Olin Wright’s integrated class analytic framework to argue that the question of whether money is art or not leads us to a dead end. Huber suggests that a crisis such as the one unfolding in 2020 raises instead the more challenging question of what social system must come into being, such that a theory of capitalist money as art becomes intelligible. (shrink)

The contribution examines Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the fictitiousness of the commodity description of money, and its suitability as a reference for the analysis of the commodification of money within contemporary markets for credit and finance. Any critique of the commodification of money that draws on Polanyi’s influential argument should distinguish between two fundamentally different meanings of the occurrence of money as a commodity: the institutional system that makes some commodity money versus the commercial practice (...) that turns money into a commodity. Only a particular strand of Polanyi’s analysis provides a point of reference for a comprehensive critique of the commodification of money, rather than the monetization of some type of commodity. Departing from the aspects of Polanyi’s analysis that are specific to the political economy of the gold standard, the article draws on Polanyi’s material account of the essential contributions of public organization and social convention in the constitution of money. On these grounds, the commodification of money is potentially objectionable as the social disembedding of a common public institution. (shrink)

Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey have introduced a novel, and potentially powerful, vision of migration rights, on which European states might respond to the current crisis of migration by conditioning admission on the payment of an entry fee. In this comment, I raise a worry about the morality of a world governed by such a principle. While Osterloh and Frey foresee a world in which migration is made more sustainable, with benefits for all stakeholders as a result, I am (...) worried their program would lead to a lessening of support for the moral principles that gave rise to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This Convention, I argue, ought to be preserved as a public statement of the principle that wealthy states have an obligation to bear some costs in the defense of human rights; Osterloh and Frey, I argue, might be undermining support for those moral principleswe currently have the most need to reinforce. Nevertheless, I argue that under emergency circumstances we might have a need for experimentation and political innovation, even if we are confident that what they produce will necessarily involve some degree of political wrongdoing; we might, in short, have a reason to try out proposals of the sort Osterloh and Frey defend, even if the moral worries I defend here are correct. (shrink)

Against the background of the contemporary debate about financialisation, the paper conceptualises the capitalist labour economy as fundamentally a monetary system. It argues that money is not a capitalist means of organising its labour economy but that it is rather a capitalist end. The argument examines and finds wanting conceptions of money in political economy, including Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and argues that the debate about financialisation is fundamentally based on the propositions of political economy. It holds that Marx’s (...) critique of political economy conceives of money as the form of value and expounds money-making as the purpose of the capital labour economy. Thus, the labour theory of value is fundamentally a monetary theory of value, labour is the means of valorisation, and that is, of money in process, and as such capital. Making money out of money is capital as its most rational. In the form of credit, money posits wealth as a claim on future surplus value. (shrink)

This chapter explores a modest suggestion that John Locke is susceptible to a wide range of interpretations because of his position midway between premodern and modern conceptions of property rights. Lockean property represents an uneasy hybrid of classical or Christian theories of distributive justice and modern capitalist theories of procedural justice which have succeeded in the intervening centuries in displacing them. Locke's defense of private property is at once natural and positive, utilitarian and grounded in natural rights, secular and theological, (...) hedonistic and custodial. Lockean proprietorship generates affirmative responsibilities of good stewardship. Lockean property rights convey reciprocal entitlements and responsibilities. After Locke's painstaking treatment of the origins of money and private property in Second Treatise, the advent of political society appears a rather belated innovation. Instead of being natural or spontaneous, the social contract follows only in the wake of a community's assent to money and its attendant inequalities. (shrink)