"Money": An Essay by Stefan Eich (Keywords: Credit;Debt;Monetary Policy;Capitalism; Banks;Time;Democracy;Collective futures)
From The Philosopher, vol. 114, no. 1 ("Towards a Critical Theory of Finance")
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I.
There is an old paradox at the heart of money: it seems to work best when left unexamined. When monetary trust holds, we barely notice it and rarely pause to ask what money is or what stands behind it. The moment we do – in monetary crises and periods of inflation – the very act of questioning can accelerate the unraveling. Money has a peculiarly oblique self-referential structure. Monetary systems depend on routine acceptance, on habits of trust that operate beneath conscious reflection. But as we shall see, this does not mean the right response is naïve ignorance or unreflective depoliticisation. Quite the contrary: for money to work reliably as institutionalised collective faith, it must remain anchored in shared social values and that requires the capacity for reflective, democratic engagement with questions of monetary power, who controls credit and, therefore, which futures are allowed to become possible.
Few human inventions are as intimate and as abstract as money. We encounter it daily, yet it remains oddly elusive. We worry about having too little of it, suspect others of having too much, and devote enormous institutional ingenuity to managing it. And yet when pressed to say what money is, even highly educated people hesitate. Is it wealth? A social convention? A trick? This unease is not accidental. Money has often been a slightly embarrassing object of reflection. It can easily seem too mundane for philosophers, too metaphysical for economists, too suspicious for political theorists. Instead, as Marx quipped in A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) by paraphrasing Gladstone, not even love itself has driven more men to madness than has meditation on the nature of money.
To hold money is to hold time: borrowed, deferred, anticipated.
Money is often described as a medium of exchange, but this is misleadingly modest. Exchange happens in the present; money always reaches forward. One useful way to begin, then, is with a simple but disarming observation: money is a promise. Or more precisely, a promise that circulates. A banknote, a digital balance, even a coin is not valuable because of what it is but because of what it claims. It points beyond itself: to future acceptance, to goods not yet acquired, to obligations deferred. To accept money is to accept a claim on the future. ‘Money,’ John Maynard Keynes wrote in The General Theory (1936), ‘is, above all, a subtle device for linking the present to the future.’ It links today’s labour to tomorrow’s consumption, yesterday’s debts to future repayments, and present expectations to imagined worlds yet to come. Money is a technology of anticipation.
To hold money is to hold time: borrowed, deferred, anticipated. But it is also to stand within a web of social expectations. Money is, in this sense, a form of circulating credit, accepted because of trust or force, and usually some combination of the two. Modern money makes this especially clear. The overwhelming majority of money today is not physical cash but bank credit: entries in ledgers, IOUs that circulate because they are widely accepted as payment, not least by the state. Inversely, when monetary systems break down, what collapses is not merely purchasing power but shared confidence in the future itself. This temporal power helps explain why money has always provoked anxiety. Not coincidentally, usury – the charging of interest – was in medieval debates condemned as a form of theft: to charge interest was to sell time, and time belonged only to God.
II.
If money is a circulating promise, the question follows: who stands behind the promise? This took on a new urgency with the emergence of paper money in the course of the eighteenth century. Unlike coinage, paper money revealed with uncomfortable clarity that monetary value does not simply rest on ‘intrinsic’ value, and indeed never did. Instead, it is the product of collective belief and legal authority. The appearance of paper currency therefore forced philosophers and political thinkers to confront money not simply as a medium of exchange but as a circulating sign that posed profound social and political questions. Few thinkers confronted this more directly than the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Writing as a student of Kant in the wake of the French Revolution, Fichte sketched in The Closed Commercial State (1800) one of the most ambitious attempts to understand money as a social contract.
Money is a form of circulating credit, accepted because of trust or force, and usually some combination of the two.
Fichte began from a striking observation. Monetary value, he noted, appears to rest on shifting market expectations and speculative judgments that are frequently irrational and necessarily lie beyond any single community’s control. A currency anchored primarily in external markets, he argued, ultimately depends on irrational forces of opinion. In his sketch Fichte proposed instead that a currency could be anchored in a different kind of guarantee: the binding commitment of a political community to maintain the value of its money among its citizens. Monetary stability would no longer be left to the vagaries of markets but would become a constitutional responsibility of the state, anticipating the way central banks operate today. Crucially, monetary governance was from this perspective not simply a tool of economic coordination but a condition of political freedom. Without a stable measure of value, citizens cannot reliably plan their lives, enter contracts, or exercise meaningful economic agency. Money, in this view, is the medium through which citizens project themselves into the future.
The solution offered by Fichte was intentionally radical. His vision of a closed commercial state was soon overtaken by an explosion of international trade and imperial competition that marked the rise of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. Yet the underlying philosophical insight remains powerful. Money, as Fichte and his contemporary Goethe both recognised, is a social institution that becomes real through shared recognition and repeated use. Its authority rests on a circular structure of trust. Money is accepted because it is believed to be accepted. This is both stabilising and fragile. Paper money inhabited a space of constant suspicion which fueled both a generational concern with questions of authenticity and a philosophical interest in the relation between reality (Sein) and semblance (Schein). To hold the permanent possibility of doubt at bay, money must therefore constantly stage its own credibility. It must repeatedly say: trust me!
But if money is accepted on the basis of shared belief rather than intrinsic substance, then the appearance of solidity – the face of the coin, the authority of the state issuing the note, the confidence of the balance sheet – is always also a kind of illusion: not a lie, but a socially necessary semblance. Every promise that circulates is also, in some measure, a performance. And every performance carries the possibility of its own unmasking.
III.
This performative politics of trust exposes a tension that becomes especially acute under capitalism. Capitalist economies depend on money functioning smoothly and predictably. But they also transform monetary relations into market relations, where credit, interest, and liquidity appear as impersonal forces rather than political arrangements. Crucially, capitalism transforms money’s temporal character: the future itself becomes a commodity to be bought and sold through credit markets, derivatives, and financial instruments.
At the heart of Marx’s critique lies this transformation. In responding both to liberals who sought to stabilise the currency through legal reforms as well as utopian socialists who saw monetary reform as the key to shaking off exploitation, Marx argued that money was more symptom than a magical lever. It could neither be used to tame the crises of capital nor to overcome capitalist exploitation. Instead, capitalism gave money a peculiar ideological role. Monetary relations appear as natural facts – prices, wages, interest rates – rather than as historically contingent social arrangements. Under capitalism, the social relations that constitute money become themselves commodified. As a result, money becomes what Marx called an ‘objective illusion’: a social relation that appears as a property of things. The political choices embedded in money’s temporal allocations are recast as the impersonal verdicts of the market: who gets credit, whose debts are forgiven, whose futures are foreclosed.
The political choices embedded in money’s temporal allocations are recast as the impersonal verdicts of the market: who gets credit, whose debts are forgiven, whose futures are foreclosed.
Yet the force of this insight depends on understanding what ‘objective’ means here. An objective illusion is not simply a lie that could be corrected by better information. It is an appearance produced by the structure of the thing itself. As Theodor Adorno argued in a 1962 seminar on Marx, the fetish character of the commodity – especially the money commodity – is not a mistake but an objective feature of capitalism. As Adorno observed, ‘Even if we see through illusion, this does not change the fetish-character of the commodity: every businessman who calculates has to act according to this fetish. If he does not calculate in this way, he goes broke.’ The apparent neutrality of capitalist money is more than a deception; it is the necessary form in which money’s peculiar social character presents itself. Drawing on Hegel’s concept of Schein – a semblance that belongs to the essence of the thing rather than concealing it – Adorno insisted that exchange performs a ‘real conceptual operation’ each time money changes hands. Money does not merely represent equivalence between incommensurable human activities, needs, and futures but it enacts that equivalence, and this enactment is both true and false. True, because exchange really occurs, debts are discharged, coordination across difference is achieved. False, because the qualitative differences between human lives are effaced in the very act that makes them commensurable. If the commodity is, in Adorno’s formulation, the archetype (the Urform) of ideology, this is doubly true for the money commodity: not because it deceives, but because it generates a form of appearance that is at once illusory and real. ‘That the categories of illusion are in truth also categories of reality,’ Adorno concluded, ‘this is dialectic.’
The powerful yet misleading ideal of neutral money emerges from this context. Neutral money promises a currency insulated from politics, governed by technical rules rather than public contestation. Independent central banks, inflation targets, and monetary rules are often justified as protections against the instability of democratic pressure. Yet this appearance of neutrality is itself a political achievement. Capitalism requires money to appear natural precisely because monetary decisions have profound distributive consequences. Interest rates shape employment, asset prices redistribute wealth, and credit availability structures opportunity across generations. To cast these outcomes as purely technical is not merely to sidestep politics, but to elide it. There is another twist. For capitalism at the same time repeatedly generates crises that reveal money’s political character and the fiction of neutrality. Financial crashes, bailouts, and emergency monetary interventions expose the extraordinary discretionary power embedded in modern monetary institutions. Here the seemingly impenetrable façade of neutrality fractures.
IV.
Modern central banking embodies this paradox with particular clarity. As seen most clearly during the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic-era expansion of central bank balance sheets, central banks wield enormous power over credit conditions, asset markets, and economic expectations. Yet they typically exercise this power in a language of technical modesty. In some sense, central bankers are the last unreconstructed constructivists. Monetary authority depends on credibility, and credibility depends on words. But what central bankers manage, above all, is time. For example, forward guidance – the practice of signalling future policy intentions – is not merely a communication strategy. It is the management of collective temporal horizons. When a central bank announces that interest rates will remain low “for a considerable period,” it is telling markets, firms, and citizens how to imagine the near future. It is structuring expectations about what tomorrow will look like and who will be able to plan for it.
A society that refuses to speak openly about the politics of money risks losing more than economic stability.
This temporal power operates in a peculiar register. The language is public, yet because central banks are tasked with financial stability its primary audience is not the citizenry but financial markets. Monetary decisions are framed as technical responses to economic indicators rather than as choices about collective priorities. Central banking performatively blurs the distinction between policy and communication. Markets respond not only to decisions but to tone, phrasing, and suggestion. Money, in this sense, speaks. But it speaks the language of public relations, not open-ended democratic deliberation.
This is where the paradox of unexamined money shades into something more troubling: the active organisation of ignorance. Finance has developed elaborate institutional mechanisms for protecting itself from public knowledge. It actively cultivates opacity, complexity, and the aura of irreducible expertise as shields against democratic accountability. Technocratic fixes tend to hide behind a neutralising wall of acronyms. When this asymmetry of vision becomes entrenched, when only financiers and technocrats can actually see the flows, the paradox of unexamined money becomes a political arrangement that systematically excludes democratic publics from decisions that shape their collective futures.
But this invisibility comes at a cost. When money is excluded from political vision, it risks becoming a thoughtless instrument of accumulation and inequality. Trust, rather than being strengthened, becomes fragile precisely because it lacks public justification. The very stability that comes from not questioning money erodes the foundations on which that stability rests. Money’s authority therefore depends on a delicate balance between trust and coercion, belief and enforcement. Monetary stability is, in this sense, not merely an economic achievement but a communicative and political accomplishment that must be continuously performed and that remains open to political contestation.
V.
The democratic cost of this arrangement is a peculiar unease. Citizens are told that money is too important to be left to public debate. Instead, markets must be reassured and credibility must be maintained. This elision of a democratic politics of money is mirrored by populist critiques, conspiracy theories, and periodic backlashes. These responses are easily dismissed as irrational. Yet they reflect a genuine contradiction. Modern democracies depend on monetary institutions whose decisions profoundly shape collective futures, while those same institutions remain insulated from democratic justification.
To recognise this tension is not to advocate reckless politicisation. Money is fragile. It depends on coordination and trust. But fragility is not a reason for repression. It precisely requires careful political engagement. Historically, democratic societies have experimented with different ways of navigating this tension: parliamentary oversight of public debt, public banking institutions, social compromises linking monetary stability to employment goals. None of these arrangements eliminates conflict, but they acknowledged that money cannot be severed from political life without cost.
We have entered a renewed period of monetary uncertainty. Central bankers are in the limelight, even as they disavow their own agency. Inflation has returned as a central political concern. Climate change raises fundamental questions of credit allocation and livable futures, while existing climate finance mainly seeks to mobilise capital by predetermining which futures count as investable. These developments deepen society’s dependence on monetary expertise while simultaneously exposing the limits of treating money as a purely technical domain. At stake are enduring questions. What kinds of promises should money embody? How far into the future should those promises extend? And who should decide?
To think and deliberate about monetary power politically is the beginning of reclaiming the future as a site of collective decision rather than market fate.
Money’s political significance lies not only in who owns it, but in who has the power to create and govern credit, and thereby shape the range of possible futures. Every monetary system distributes futures unevenly. Some lives become elastic, able to absorb shocks and wait for returns. Others are compressed into permanent urgency, lived from paycheck to paycheck. The fantasy of neutral money remains powerful in this context not only because it obscures this temporal misallocation, but because it promises a future governed by rules rather than political conflict. Democratic unease about money reflects in this sense the fundamental exclusion at the heart of the fantasy of neutral money: who is deciding whose futures become possible? If democracy means anything beyond periodic elections, it must include the capacity to debate how collective futures are being structured through monetary institutions.
Money will never be a comfortable object of reflection. It will always carry the anxiety of deferred time and uncertain promises. Yet a society that refuses to speak openly about the politics of money risks losing more than economic stability. It risks losing the sense that its future remains something it can collectively imagine, contest, and shape. This does not mean that we can shape money at will. The categories of monetary illusion are also, as Adorno recognised, categories of monetary reality. We should not ascribe to money more power than it has. But we must also recognise that even contemporary money can never fully contain political contestations that point toward alternative possibilities and offer a glimpse of yet unrealised futures.
What would it mean, concretely, to take responsibility for money? Not to dispel the paradox but to refuse the conclusion that opacity is therefore inevitable or desirable. Democratic engagement with money does not require that every citizen understand the mechanics of reserve requirements or derivative pricing. It requires, rather, that the fundamental questions – who wields the power to create credit, whose debt is forgiven, which futures are rendered investable and which foreclosed – be treated as political questions, answerable to democratic deliberation rather than merely private calculation or technocratic decree. A monetary politics that makes credit allocation a matter of democratic debate rather than market verdict would not only redistribute economic power. It would expand the horizon of the politically imaginable: new forms of public credit for climate transition, debt relief that reflects social rather than purely financial judgment, or monetary frameworks that treat full employment as a genuine political obligation rather than a variable to be sacrificed to discipline expectations.
Such demands will, no doubt, be severely contested and they will have no guarantee of success. They will also be routinely circumscribed by the constraints of capitalism. The point cannot be to underwrite a fantasy of monetary malleability but to locate more precisely the scope for and limits to genuine monetary politics. To make the sublime powers of credit creation visible as a political problem is itself already a small act of democratic recovery. To think and deliberate about monetary power politically is the beginning of reclaiming the future as a site of collective decision rather than market fate.
Stefan Eich is Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University, and a Joint Fellow of the NYU Remarque Institute and the CUNY Moynihan Center. He is the author of The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes (Princeton University Press). When not pondering the nature of money, he is now writing a book about the political thought of John Maynard Keynes.
First published online 13 September 2026
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