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It reconstructs Adam Smith’s market-centered view of money and then evaluates Stefan Eich’s claim that money is inherently political, shaped by “money power” in the public-private collaboration of banks and central banks. Using examples from the U.S. monetary system and the 2008 crisis, it frames money as governed by plutocratic priorities.",{"@graph":69,"@context":123},[70,84,106],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/reading-the-history-of-money-politically-or-ideologically-review-essay/148109/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/reading-the-history-of-money-politically-or-ideologically-review-essay/148109.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Aria","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-17","2026-08-26",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":105},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",12,{"@type":107,"mainEntity":108},"FAQPage",[109,115,119],{"name":110,"@type":111,"acceptedAnswer":112},"Why does the essay criticize attempts to keep money “apolitical” in economics?","Question",{"text":113,"@type":114},"It argues that purging politics and morality from economics obscures who creates, operates, and manages money, making its power relations harder to see.","Answer",{"name":116,"@type":111,"acceptedAnswer":117},"What does Stefan Eich claim is the core issue about money and politics?",{"text":118,"@type":114},"He argues the question is not whether money has a political dimension, but how politics should unfold and which values should guide it.",{"name":120,"@type":111,"acceptedAnswer":121},"How does the essay describe “money power” in the current monetary system?",{"text":122,"@type":114},"It locates money power in collaboration between central banks and commercial banks, including practices delegated to private banks to create money.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":125,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":127,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":129,"site_id":62},148109,1787775176,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":132},{"doc_id":129,"user_id":133,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":134,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":135,"file_id":136,"file_url":137,"file_type":138,"file_size":139,"view_count":105,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":44,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":130,"read_time":144,"preview_page_count":4},2336464648322,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/2200025388227c56fec?_k=1778556882303663488","Modern Intellectual History (2025), 22, 372–380 doi:10.1017/S1479244324000428  \nREVIEW ESSAY  \nReading the History of Money: Politically or Ideologically?  \nCarl Wennerlind  \nDepartment of History, Barnard College, New York, USA  \nEmail: [cw503@columbia.edu](cw503@columbia.edu)  \nStefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to  \nKeynes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022)  \nGeorge Caffentzis, Civilizing Money: Hume, His Monetary Project and the Scottish  \nHighlands (London: Pluto Press, 2021)  \nMainstream economists have persistently sought to purge politics and morality from economics. During their more confident moments, they argue that economics is valuefree, a so-called positive science. This perspective has deeply influenced their way of theorizing money. Indeed, modern neoclassical economics is just the latest instantiation of a long-standing tradition of economic thinkers obfuscating the ontology of money in order to render its politics invisible or unintelligible. This practice dates back at least to Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, when the great Scottish philosopher made a powerful argument for the market as the most just and efficient social mediation device. If there were large numbers of buyers and sellers, the market would ensure that no one person or firm had the power to dictate prices or the quantity transacted. Should anyone seek to impose power over someone else and force them to pay above the market price, that person could simply elect to transact with someone else. The most democratic solution possible, the market outcome was achievable without any assistance or intervention by the government. Money, to Smith, was an adjunct to the market, emerging organically to facilitate the ease of exchange. No person or institution was responsible for creating it, had the power to manage it, or could dictate its value. Unfortunately, according to Smith, crowns and governments often succumbed to the temptation of trying to control and manipulate money, but such efforts never ended up successful. Their actions, Smith argued, were grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding of the relations between money and politics. One of the primary aims of the Wealth of Nations was to rectify this by teaching the public that money should not be the subject of politics.  \nIn his excellent new book, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes, political scientist Stefan Eich argues that economists have fundamentally misunderstood, or rather misconstrued, money. He argues that there  \n© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence ([http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.  \n[https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000428](https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244324000428) Published online by Cambridge University Press  \nModern Intellectual History 373  \nshould not be a debate as to “whether money has or should have a political dimension but instead over how that politics ought to play out and what values should guide it”  \n(xvi) . Efforts to encase money from politics are often motivated by an effort to distract the public from seeing who really creates, operates, and manages money. At the current moment, what Eich calls “money power” resides in the private–public collaboration between central banks and commercial banks. In the case of the United States, it is “not just the Federal Reserve that can create money out of thin air; the state has delegated this practice of magic for the most part to private banks”(3) . While the machinations of power at the center of the monetary mechanism become more transparent during crises, such as the one that hit the world economy in 2008, the F","cbCaiuTtTV4VQ5k7","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiuTtTV4VQ5k7","pdf",178040,"English","# Review Essay\n## Money as an Apolitical Science\n## Misconstruing Money and Politics\n## Money Power in Central and Commercial Banking\n## Crises, Transparency, and Political Agenda","[{\"question\":\"Why does the essay criticize attempts to keep money “apolitical” in economics?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that purging politics and morality from economics obscures who creates, operates, and manages money, making its power relations harder to see.\"},{\"question\":\"What does Stefan Eich claim is the core issue about money and politics?\",\"answer\":\"He argues the question is not whether money has a political dimension, but how politics should unfold and which values should guide it.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the essay describe “money power” in the current monetary system?\",\"answer\":\"It locates money power in collaboration between central banks and commercial banks, including practices delegated to private banks to create money.\"}]","Reading the History of Money - Politically or Ideologically? - Review Essay | PDF",23]