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Money Politics before the New Deal with Jakob Feinig
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William Saas: Circling back to your own work, you contrast processes of what you call "monetary silencing" to moral economies that are rooted in shared knowledge about money's institutional shaping. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of these terms? Where do they come from and what are their stakes for you?
Jakob Feinig: Absolutely. When I talk about moral economies, I talk about events and processes in which money users relate to the institutions that issue money, and also about monetary knowledge that informs direct action. It can also be electoral action or campaigning. [Moral economies] mobilize an idea of monetary justice that's not limited to questions of money distribution or demand for welfare payments. They're about what money is, about money's public purpose, and about how monetary institutions should be arranged to conform to their specific ideas about justice. The idea of moral economy comes from the British historian, E.P. Thompson. She developed it to counter dismissals of non-elite economic thinking that were and are still common. They are still very present in the historiography about popular involvement in monetary institutions. [Moral economies] are about taking seriously non-elite economic thought. They're also about how people nominate forms of economic thought and form action.
And so, I'm trying to understand this: who mobilizes moral economies and how are they developed? And, on the other hand, how are they silenced? I derive the term "monetary silencing" from the Brazilian thinker, Paulo Freire, who says that silence about political issues is a relation between those who have a voice, those who don't, and those who have already been silenced. For him, such situations of silence are dehumanizing because they embody a denial of people's right to participate in making their own history. So I am looking at processes of monetary silencing, which from his perspective, are also processes of dehumanization because they disconnect people from the institutions that condition their individual and collective lives. [Monetary silencing] is about excluding people from knowledge of monetary institutions and turning them into mere money users and consumers—people whose knowledge doesn't go beyond using a credit card, depositing a check, or knowing where to get money from a pay-day lender. It's about silencing anything that comes close to a structural vision.
Jakob Feinig is assistant professor of human development at Binghamton University.
