Christine Desan.Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism.

Abstract

The engraved picture of President Andrew Jackson on the U.S. twenty-dollar bill will soon be replaced by former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, a truly dramatic change in the social iconography of American money. But it will still say, “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Regardless of whose face is on the front, the note can be used to satisfy all debts, whether to a public entity (like the IRS) or a private one (like a retailer). Fungible money means any person’s twenty-dollar debt can be satisfied with any twenty-dollar bill. All twenty-dollar bills are created equal, so to speak. The debts that need satisfaction mostly arise in the course of market exchange. This connection between markets and money has informed much prior scholarship about money, from neoclassical economics to the critical social science of Karl Marx and Georg Simmel. But debts arise in other settings as well, which Christine Desan addresses in Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. Taxpayers owe money to the government, an obligation that does not stem from market exchange but which undergirds the political redistribution of resources to support the provision of collective goods. Taxes appear extraneous to the pairing that seems naturally to unite markets with money, but for Desan such public debts were instrumental in the origins of capitalist money. Furthermore, failure to comprehend those origins was itself part of the constitutive process. In questioning its original connection to market exchange, and in recovering what was forgotten, Desan forces us to rethink the social significance of money.