Money: 5,000 years of debt and power

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"As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, without anything to stop it. When a senator asked Bernanke what would happen if the central bank did not carry out its rescue package, he replied,"lf we don't do this, we may not have an economy on Monday." What saved finance, and the Western economy, was money. Yet it is a highly ambivalent phenomenon. It is deeply embedded in our societies, acting as a powerful link between the individual and the collective. But by no means is it neutral. Through its grip on finance and the debts system, money confers sovereign power on the economy. If confidence in money is not maintained, crises will follow. Looking over the last 5,000 years, this book explores the development of money and its close connection to sovereign power. Michel Aglietta mobilises the tools of anthropology, history and political economy in order to analyse how political structures and monetary systems have transformed one another. We can thus grasp the different eras of monetary regulation and the crises capitalism has endured throughout its history"--;"Founder of the influential heterodox regulation school offers a new theory of money, tracing it's history back 1,000 years This book's goal is to understand money in all its complexity. As a link between the individual and the collective, over time money transmits sovereign power to the economy, by way of its grip on finance and thus on the debt system. But liquidity is also the object around which everyone's desires are polarised. Keeping a hold over this ambivalence demands the construction - and continual bolstering - of confidence. For from the destruction of this confidence come the crises that resurrect the absolute desire for liquidity, paralysing activity. Money is embedded in our societies, and we can only understand it by way of a multi-disciplinary approach that mobilises the tools of anthropology, history and political economy. This book covers five thousand years of history in order to grasp the unity of money as a phenomenon and its relationship with sovereignty, by way of the combined transformations of both political orders and monetary systems. Basing ourselves on these foundations we can understand the distinct eras of the regulation of money and the crises that have traversed capitalism, up to the transformations of our own time"-- Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Money as a Relation of Social Belonging 1. Money Is the Foundation of Value 2. Logics of Debt and Forms of Sovereignty Part II: The Historical Trajectories of Money 3. From Ancient Empires to the Gold Standard 4. The Upheavals of the Twentieth Century Part III: Crises and Monetary Regulation 5. Monetary Crises in History 6. Monetary Regulation Under Capitalism Part IV: The Enigma of International Currency 7. International Currency Faced with the Test of History 8. Transitioning to a New International Monetary SystemNotes Bibliography Index