Money Has No Value

We need a new theory of money. The still-dominant theory of money as taught in intro textbooks is 100+ years old, and for almost that long we have known that it’s totally wrong. The best alternative are "heterodox" accounts developed in the 90s and 00s. These are indeed better overall descriptions of money, but they remain incomplete and inadequate: they rely too much on why the orthodoxy is wrong, thereby incorrectly assuming there is only one alternative (so-called heterodoxy). Money has no value develops a new (more subtle, more sophisticated) theory of money. It takes more seriously than any other work to date, the depth and seriousness of the fundamental claim that all money is credit. Money is not a thing, but a marker of a social relation of credit and debt between two parties. Money is not value itself; no form of money (as money) ever possesses any positive, intrinsic value. Second, the book shows that not only is all money credit, but that in an important theoretical sense, all credit is money to the extent any credit/debt between two parties has the potential to be transferred to another party (thereby functioning as money). Finally, the book links this radical credit theory of money to today’s concrete money practices: this includes global capital flows, national and international monetary policy, and most of all the daily turnover in the money markets. The book therefore develops the needed conceptual framework to ask questions like: what is going on with Bitcoin (much less GameStop) in 2021.

Biographie - Chambers, Samuel A.

Samuel A. Chambers teaches political theory, cultural politics, and political economy at Johns Hopkins University. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Contemporary Political Theory and series co-editor of Routledge's Innovators in Political Theory. His interests are broad and interdisciplinary—ranging from central issues in social and political theory, to engagements with contemporary feminist and queer theory, to contributions to critical television studies. All of his work maintains a core concern with a sort of "glue" that holds together things—e.g., political regimes, sex/gender identities, pedagogical relations—in a way that is neither narrowly political (in the traditional sense of legislation or public policy), nor reductively socio-biological, nor grounded in ethics or morality à la so-called normative political philosophy. His published writings are similarly wide-ranging. He has authored seven books, edited four more, and published more than thirty journal articles, along with numerous chapters and essays. His most recent book is Capitalist Economics (OUP 2022).

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"The provocative, counterintuitive title challenges us to think as deeply as Sam Chambers has done in Money Has No Value. In doing so, we see how meticulous scholarship and relentless logic can take us to a new level of understanding beyond the confused debates that have dogged the theory of money for centuries."

− Geoffrey Ingham, Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University, author of The Nature of Money

"Money, Chambers shows in this important book, is at heart always a social relation of credit. But what would it mean for a credit theory of money to take seriously the role of the state as one of the primary sites of capitalist production? Building on a powerful re-reading of early-twentieth century theories of credit, Money Has No Value offers a seminal intervention in foundational debates over the nature of money and carves out an original place for a novel conception of credit money. Chambers questions not just received orthodox wisdom but also deftly challenges recent revisionist understandings of money. Brilliant, elegant, and written with revisionist verve, Money Has No Value is an essential contribution for theorists, historians, and students of contemporary money alike."

− Stefan Eich, Georgetown University, author of The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes

"Chambers takes on an immense and dual task: recalibrate the immensely complicated scholarship on money in order to rethink the tangled web of assumptions we hold about it. That he does so with such originality, rigor, and clarity is even more impressive. The stakes for understanding money have never been higher, and this book – one of the most important of its kind – rises to the challenge."

− Jacob Swanson, Georgetown University