Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 2 3 4 5
Currency and Credit and State The Nature of History of The New
Credit
Theories of Money
Economic Lombard Street:
by R. G. Hawtrey Money: The by Geoffrey Analysis
How the Fed
Contributions of
Ingham by Joseph A. Became the
A. Mitchell Innes
by Perry Mehrling
Y
our book recommendations about money include
some very old texts, including a couple of books that
are over 100 years old. To start us off, perhaps you
might explain what money is, exactly, and why people seem
to have had better ideas about this at the beginning of the
Samuel A.
20th century? Chambers
Samuel A. Chambers is
I would start by describing the list as an odd one. It doesn’t look like Professor and Chair of
other lists, perhaps because this proves to be such a challenging topic. I the department of
political science at
think that we can understand the history of economic thought around Johns Hopkins
money as a history of misunderstandings. There are a lot of clear, University, where he
teaches political
concise summary texts that will tell you what money is, but having theory, cultural politics,
studied money and taught about it for the past decade— ‘what is and political economy.
money?’ has been my question for the last ten years—I think that most He has published or
edited a dozen books,
such texts are just completely wrong. They aren’t even close. in work that ranges
from theories of
You can take something like The Origins of Money by Carl Menger, from society, language, and
democratic politics, to
the early 20th century, as a very straightforward text, explaining why critical television
money is a commodity. It tells a story about how we went from the studies, to a broad and
concerted effort to
barter of commodities to picking one commodity as the most saleable understand the nature
commodity, and it becoming money. And those stories inform of both capitalism and
money. His most
introductory textbook in economics and that’s the standard account. recent book
Unfortunately, it’s just not true. is Capitalist
Economics (Oxford
There have been some good critiques of that account, but developing a 2021). He is currently
working on a book on
fuller account has been very hard. I’m not a historian. I’m a social and the history and theory
political theorist, and a political economist. But the more I studied of money, titled Money
Has No Value.
money, the more I realized that there was a period in the late 19th
century where bankers had a handle on money, particularly within
British banking practices, with the pound sterling as the international
money of account. There were some ideas extant then—with some
people really seeing what money was about—that was later lost. And
then there’s this period, basically from the beginning of World War I
through World War II, where money practices changed dramatically,
and people started thinking about money in a very different way. And so
I picked a couple of texts from that period, the books by Ralph Hawtrey
and Alfred Mitchell-Innes.
But I should also say that the Joseph Schumpeter book’s date of 1954 is
misleading. He worked on it for multiple decades and it was incomplete
when he died. Most of it was written in this same period of time, the
1910s and 1920s. And that was a period of time when alternative views,
alternatives to the idea of money as a commodity, flourished.
Schumpeter, in his 1,100 page book, describes dozens and dozens of
theories and arguments and positions on money. He shows readers that
there are a number of key questions to ask about money, and a complex
variety of theories. It’s not a simple dichotomy.
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If
you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just
what you say about them) please email us at editor@fivebooks.com
© FIVE BOOKS 2022