The Telos Press Podcast: Edward Hadas on the Ideologies of Money

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Edward Hadas about his article “Three Rival Versions of Monetary Enquiry: The Ideologies of Money,” from Telos 194 (Spring 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below.
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From Telos 194 (Spring 2021):

Three Rival Versions of Monetary Enquiry: The Ideologies of Money

Edward Hadas

The title of this article is a tribute to Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. One of the core theses of that book is that there can be no meaningful fusion of fundamentally different approaches to moral analysis. I will argue that something similar is the case for money. There are three distinct understandings of what is called “money,” which cannot meaningfully be unified. The “what is called” qualification is significant. As I will explain, the single word “money” is actually used in essentially different ways.

Before attempting to justify that assertion, I will provide a little personal intellectual context. My effort to understand money is an integral part of a much broader striving to develop a truly humanistic paradigm of the economy. My ultimate goal is a framework that is comprehensive, coherent, and compatible with (indeed, based on) Christian anthropology and sociology. It will also, I hope, be useful for living in and organizing the modern economy. An important part of the journey is the abandonment or rethinking of many commonly accepted ideas. Two of those faulty notions are relevant for this paper: first, that economics is essentially a quantitative discipline; and second, that money is at the center of economics.

The first claim cannot be true, because no aspect of being human is primarily or even secondarily numerical. Numbers and quantities simply cannot get to the heart of, for example, how we live in society, how we bask in the love of beauty (and in the beauty of love), and how we are conscious of mortality and aware of the divine. Whatever economic activity is (I will define it soon), it clearly belongs to human nature and human experience in much the same way as these other aspects of life. Like them, it is not essentially numerical or quantifiable.

Similarly, like philosophy, theology, and aesthetics, economics is a discipline that studies an essentially nonquantitative activity. It cannot be primarily quantitative. Of course, measuring and counting are sometimes useful in economics, as they are in all human studies, but nothing essential about the ways we act and are can be guided or described by anything that can be measured on a numeric scale.

Once the first claim, that economics is numerical, has been rejected, the second, that money is at the center of economics, necessarily collapses. The study of something has to correspond in basic ways to the nature of the thing studied. Nothing numerical, then, including the money-numbers of prices, wages, tax payments, and so forth, can be essential to the study of essentially nonnumerical economic activity. Economists should study money insofar as it is an economic phenomenon (as I will do in the first part of this article), but their study of the economy should not be primarily monetary.

The rejection of the centrality of money does not only undermine the conventional wisdom of economists. It also challenges the many experts in politics, history, and culture who have considered the increased reliance on money in modern economies to be a central aspect of modernity, whether for worse or for better. I believe that these grand negative and positive monetary-cultural assumptions are largely wrong. It is worth stating some of their claims about the purported major transition to a monetized society so that I can gradually show why they are erroneous.

I will start with the thinkers who disapprove of the role of money, overall the more intellectually distinguished group. There are several schools of criticism, including many strands of romantic, traditionalist, and communitarian thinking. Perhaps the most relentless attacks come from Marxists, especially left Marxists who drink deeply from the well of the master’s early writings.

The cultural Marxists and their epigones in other disciplines frequently describe the modern reliance on money as something like substance abuse. Money is a drug that leads to personal and social alienation. It dissolves traditions, debases the notion of value, and reduces everything noble to an arbitrary number. More dogmatic economic Marxists and their fellow travelers add that money is a cruel and crucial weapon in class warfare, which they consider to be the dominant social tension of every age.

Academically, the cadre of money enthusiasts may be less successful than their money-despising rivals, but they are far more influential socially and politically. There are various approaches. For example, economists often think that money is in a long-term intimate relationship with utilitarian philosophy, although utilitarian philosophers are often not as committed. However, the people most smitten with money are the promoters of “capitalism,” “free markets,” and “economic growth,” who basically set the economic agenda for most governments.

These money lovers (I speak conceptually, of course) generally see money as good because it accurately measures values, effortlessly stores those values over time, and efficiently moves them through space. They also see money as crucial because it is the key to a well-functioning economy, which, they mostly believe, should and does shape the society and the culture. Some extreme enthusiasts even postulate a sort of monetary physics in which impersonal “market forces,” expressed solely in money-numbers, ensure that the entire economy runs smoothly—untouched by anything nonquantitative.

The critics and enthusiasts reject each other’s economic and social judgments, but they agree that money is at the center of the modern economy and that it plays a significant social role. I have said that both of these judgments have to be mistaken because quantitative money cannot be central to something as nonquantitative as human life in society. To make my case fully, I need to describe what the economy is and how money actually fits in.

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