Mythology, Methodology, and Medievalisms
Today’s post is a shorter “meta” post in which I will offer some reflections on methodology and the future of this blog. It marks, in some ways, a departure from — or expansion of — the blog’s original stated goals.
1. The Standing of History
So far on “Trial of the Pyx,” I’ve focused mainly on examining the historical claims about money made by Modern Monetary Theory, which has been my research project for the last half-decade. Some of the material originally posted here ended up in my finished dissertation, The Difference that Money Makes, which you can read here. With the completion of this project, I take my point to have largely been made: those who are open to letting history challenge our gee-whiz stories will see that there are serious, even fatal problems with the basic claims about the nature and origins of money forwarded by the neochartalists, while those who are committed to the theory for reasons of politics or sunk social capital will be uninterested in even trying to defend their claims against my criticisms (nor do they need to, since they are seeking power rather than the truth, and are thus not really engaged in a scholarly project at all). There is, therefore, not a lot more to say on that particular front (I do, however, welcome engagement and criticism of that text, which will at some point be reissued in a revised form correcting various typos and minor errors).
There is, however, a lot more to say about the history of money, for its own sake, and I’ll be continuing that work and posting some snippets of it here as I go along. The sequel to my dissertation, which I am imagining might be titled An Imperial Par, will further consider the history and political stakes of bi- and tri-metallic coinage systems, beginning with the origins of coinage in Lydia and the reform of the famous King Croesus/Kroisos and then tracing this history through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. The Romans laid the basic foundations for not only Western European moneys but Islamic ones as well, and their influence can therefore be found in monetary systems throughout a large chunk of the world all the way up until the decimalization reforms of the later 20th century.
In tracing this history, I’ll be considering a question that is a bit orthogonal to the one asked in my dissertation. In that text, I tried to understand monetary sovereignty as a power concerned with the creation of differences: with the opening up of monetary spreads between intrinsic and nominal values, establishing a difference between the interior of a territorial monetary space and its outside. In An Imperial Par, I’ll be examining instead the notion of an imperial monetary power as concerned with inter-territorial identities rather than intra-territorial differences. In other words, I’ll be forwarding the claim that one of the fundamental characteristics of imperial power, considered as a monetary phenomenon, is the attempt to construct and defend unit of account parity across territorial space. At the center of this story is the Roman solidus, a coin whose name once meant the same thing everywhere, and from which we derive the word “soldier.”
I anticipate, however, that bringing this project to completion may take me at least another ten years, and that it may end up being a rather monstrously long book. In the meantime, then, I have begun to envision a second project, one which is less concerned with monetary history and more concerned with the critique of economics. I first became interested in money because of the fact that the economists were having an argument about it — which they were clearly ill-equipped to resolve, since none of the contending parties were adequately familiar with, or showed any interest in becoming familiar with, the relevant historical literature. When economists (or their close associates, the lawyers) argue with one another, they cannot avoid making some sort of gesture towards history, but these historical claims are usually little more than cheap citational props, which nobody ever really expects to be challenged in themselves. Only very rarely — if ever — has an economist turned to the historical archive with the intention of allowing themselves to be surprised by what they find. History is little more than a mine of random facts to be harnessed in the service of theories generated elsewhere.
Thus, the basic response of the lawyers and economists to my criticisms of their claims about history is simply: “Who cares… and who are you?” To care too much about history — to put the historical horse before the theoretical cart — is to break the rules of their discursive game, and so they are completely justified, within the rules of this game, in dismissing me as a mere annoyance. Indeed, attempting to argue on the terrain of history is, for them, more than a little rude, since it takes their game “out of bounds.” What I want to do, then, is to take this game itself as an object of inquiry. I want to begin by asking why it is that we can observe a phenomenon in the discourse of the economists according to which they find it necessary always to ground the stories that they want to tell in claims about history, but when pressed on these claims also find it necessary to insist that they don’t really care about them one way or another. Why make claims that you don’t really care about? Why not simply avoid the annoying criticisms of historians by ceasing to make claims about history, at all?
2. Unmasking Economics
The economists claim a prerogative for themselves that they deny to others: they claim the right to intervene into any other scholarly discourse at all, to correct their mistakes or explain to them “what economics says” about things, but they deny to all others the right to do the same in return. The economics literature is indeed notorious for being almost entirely self-referential in the sense of only very rarely citing anything other than itself, and in undertaking to “study” things without referencing any of the literature that already exists on them. It is human beings and history that must be explained in terms of economics, rather than the other way around — and any attempt to reverse the operation is seen as fundamentally unserious. It is not so much that the historian, in seeking to critique the economists on their claims about history, is wrong, as that they lack the standing to even forward an objection in the first place. “Sit down; you have not been recognized.”
Structurally, then — and this is the claim that I want to begin exploring here and in future posts — the discourse of economics operates like a theology. Just as theology claimed the right to judge history, without being judged by history in return, so do the economists today: one cannot critique the economists’ theories about money from the standpoint of monetary history any more than one could critique the Incarnation by doing archaeology in Jerusalem. Indeed, I want to forward the even stronger claim that economics *is* a theology, and that the difference between economics and theology is a difference that is extremely important to those who believe in economics, but which is, to those who are not necessarily committed to that belief, a little more dubious or hard to perceive. In the same way, it is very important to the confessing monotheist that they are not a pagan, while to the secularist the difference between monotheists and pagans is not so important, since neither of them know the truth, which is secularism.
Secularism, then, is not the opposite of theology, but just another theology and a replacement for theology. The secular view of things is not simply a “null hypothesis,” but has a positive content of its own. And this content is what we call “economics.” I am not speaking in metaphors. Economics is a theology — it is *the* theology of the secular age — because it supplies the narrative coordinates that make it possible to posit the basic norms in terms of which society can pass judgment about its own legitimacy. It does so by positing, just as theology did, a theodicy, an eschatology, and a soteriology. Together, these little stories add up to a big story which 1) explains the world in terms of a fundamental creative principle, 2) posits the Good as the telos or goal of that principle, 3) justifies that principle against the empirical persistence of Evil, 4) narrativizes the suffering produced by that Evil by valuing it against the End of history, and 5) shows us what we have to do in order to ensure that this suffering will realize its value rather than go to waste.
I’ll try to unpack all of this going forward, a little in this post and a little more as I go along, and eventually I’ll try to explain it fully in a book. First, though, I want to respond to an immediate objection, which is that thinking about all of this stuff is quite obviously *not* what economists spend their time doing. Indeed, the modal economist probably does not even recognize any of what I just said as being made up of real words. What they actually spend their days doing is keeping track of, and trying to regulate, the way that goods are first produced by firms and then consumed by households.
To this objection, I respond that these sorts of things are not what the modal parish priest spent his time thinking about, either. What he actually spent his days doing was also keeping track of, and trying to regulate, households. This, after all, is what “economics” means. The study of economics is the study of the distributive law (nomos) of the household (oikos). And giving the nomos to the oikos is what both the bureaucratic hierarchies of the church and the modern profession of economics are mostly concerned with, on the level of their day-to-day activities. Against this, the actual content of the theology is simply a backdrop that, taken as a given, makes all the rest of this activity make sense, and supplies the basic parameters within which the ones who are doing it must think. And it is certainly not the kind of thing that people at the lower levels of this hierarchy — let alone those outside it — are encouraged to debate or dispute in any meaningful sense. “Sit down; you have not been recognized.”
3. Opening the Box of Basic Concepts
The point here is that it is because economics is a theology that economists talk about history in the way that they do. The theology that economics is depends on a story about what modernity is, because modernity and only modernity is what economists are interested in: it is only in relation to modernity that they can posit the world’s fundamental creative principle, which they must then justify, and in terms of which they can offer us salvation. What is this creative principle? It is, of course, “the market.” And what is modernity? It is, most fundamentally, a world that is no-longer-medieval.
Everything in the discourse of economics depends upon being able to say: “Once we were medieval, and this was a world in which nothing really happened, and it was ruled over by theology. Then, somehow and somewhere, things began to happen: the beginning of the relevant past. After that, we became modern, and the world overthrew theology and began to be ruled by its rightful sovereign: economics. And it is under this sovereign, and under this sovereign only, that we can go about pursuing the work of salvation, which will bring us into a relation with an end, within which we can realize the goal of human history. This end, of course, is the pursuit of [something called] ‘growth,’ and it is therefore in terms of this mission to pursue ‘growth’ that everything else about society and the world must be and can be justified.”
Thus, the economists cannot help making claims about the medieval, because it is essential to their self-understanding: only with the negation of the medieval can they begin to tell the story about what actually matters, about the “real” story of human history, which is the story of how humanity — European humanity — overcame the “static” world of its past and entered into the “dynamic” world of modernity, which it then exported by hook or by crook to everyone else in a divinely ordained mission to achieve the realization of humanity’s purpose. Don’t laugh: this is what they really believe!
There, are, therefore, a fairly small set of basic concepts that form the fundamental coordinates of the narrative that the theology called economics wants to construct. “Growth” and “the market” are perhaps the most fundamental. The market is the basic creative principle, and growth is the good that it promises and in terms of which suffering must be justified. But there are a few other angels and near-divinities arrayed in our celestial hierarchy: “money,” “value,” “utility,” “preferences,” “the consumer,” “the household,” “the state,” “the firm,” “labor,” “capital,” “progress,” “innovation,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “competition,” “the middle class,” and so on. Peer too closely at any of these concepts and one can encounter an endless bounty of what a certain philosopher once called “theological niceties.”
The question, then, is what happens if we allow ourselves to take the theological nature of economic discourse seriously, and to try to understand it for what it really is. At the end of the day, this is what was interesting about MMT: they threatened to expose, for everybody to see, that the economists did not even really know what “money” was. They thereby threatened to unmask economics for what it really was: a theology. Here, the intellectual crudeness of their theory was actually a virtue: when, for example, Warren Mosler imagined himself as the Primordial Daddy from whom all obligation originates, it was little more than an intro-seminar exercise to see the way that his discourse parodies — without a hint of irony — the basic patriarchal schema of classic monotheism or what Deleuze and Guattari might call the “Oedipal triangle.”
The goals of the proponents of the MMT theory, however, are not to start a religious war, but merely to win a struggle for supremacy within the church while leaving it intact. Since their orientation is fundamentally entryist — they want to enter the professions of the lawyers and the economists, and enter the Democratic party — they are afraid of allowing the theological controversy that their intervention threatens to unleash from getting too far out of hand in such a way that might make that project difficult. This is the reason that their patterns of thought are fundamentally conservative in relation to the discourses that already circulate within the institutions they seek to enter. “Say whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t scare the boomers!”
The problem with MMT, then, is not so much that it is wrong-er than the discourse it seeks to replace. It isn’t. Rather, the problem is that it wants to open up the box of basic concepts just far enough to let a tiny little provocation out, and then snap it shut again before the rest of what’s inside can do much harm. And this, ultimately, is why they can’t take too close of a look at history: if we approach history with the intention of allowing it to surprise us, it turns out that the basic story of “economics” might not make so much sense, at all, at the level of its basic theological foundations. If we look too closely at what happened in the world before things, according to economics, “began to be relevant,” we may end up making such a mess out of its basic angelology that that possibility of doing economics, at all, begins to come into question. It’s precisely this that I would like to achieve. And, I think, it explains why the economists so often block me when I try to talk to them about the fourteenth century.
In future posts, I’ll be making some initial stabs at expanding my exploration of this set of problems beyond the history of money as such, by exploring some issues in the historiography of the medieval guild system and the idea of a “moral economy.” Until then: keep calm, and study the coins!