Life and Money: The Genealogy of the Liberal Economy and the Displacement of Politics

345 Pages·2017·4.76 MB·English

by  Ute Astrid Tellmann

Life
&

Money
A GENEALOGY OF
THE LIBERAL ECONOMY
AND THE DISPLACEMENT
OF POLITICS
Ute Tellmann
Life
&

Money
Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History
Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History
Dick Howard, General Editor
Columbia Studies in Political Thought / Political History is a series dedicated
to exploring the possibilities for democratic initiative and the revitalization of
politics in the wake of the exhaustion of twentieth-century ideological “isms.” By
taking a historical approach to the politics of ideas about power, governance, and
the just society, this series seeks to foster and illuminate new political spaces for
human action and choice.
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Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy,
translated by Julian Bourg (2007)
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Andrew Arato, Constitution Making Under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed
Revolution in Iraq (2009)
Dick Howard, The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from
the Greeks to the French and American Revolution (2010)
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(2011)
Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound: Principles, Practices, and Prospects (2011)
David William Bates, States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (2011)
Warren Breckman, Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy
(2013)
Martin Breaugh, The Plebeian Experience: A Discontinuous History of Political
Freedom, translated by Lazer Lederhendler (2013)
Dieter Grimm, Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept,
translated by Belinda Cooper (2015)
Frank Palmeri, State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History
and Modern Social Discourse (2016)
Elías José Palti, An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth
Century to the Present (2017)
Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, eds., The Scaffolding
of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept
(2017)
Life
&
Money
THE GENEALOGY OF
THE LIBERAL ECONOMY
AND THE DISPLACEMENT
OF POLITICS
Ute Tellmann
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup .columbia .edu
Copyright © 2018 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tellmann, Ute Astrid, author.
Title: Life and money : the genealogy of the liberal economy and the
displacement of politics / Ute Astrid Tellmann.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2017] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008227 | ISBN 978-0-231-18226-3 (cloth : alk. paper)|
ISBN 978-0-231-54407-8 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Economics—Political aspects. | Liberalism—Economic
aspects.
Classification: LCC HB74.P65 T45 2017 | DDC 330—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008227
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover image: (top) John Maynard Keynes © Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/
Alamy Stock Photo. (bottom) Thomas Robert Malthus © GL Archive/Alamy
Stock Photo
Cover design: Lisa Hamm
Contents
Foreword by Dick Howard vii
Preface xiii
Introduction: The Economic and the Genealogy of Liberalism 1
Part I. Life
1. The Invention of Economic Necessity 39
2. Savage Life, Scarcity, and the Economic 63
3. The Right to Live: Economic Man, His Wife, and His Fears 90
Part II. Money
4. The Return of the Political and the Cultural Critique of
Economy 115
5. The Economic Unbound: Material Temporalities of Money 142
6. The Archipolitics of Macroeconomics 166
Epilogue: Critical Effects 195
Notes 207
Bibliography 283
Index 307

Foreword
DICK HOWARD
T
he slash in the series title “Political Thought/Political His-
tory” expresses the idea that neither pole can be analyzed
and understood without the other; they are a unity in dif-
ference. The volumes published thus far in the series propose interpreta-
tions of this structural interdependence of political thought and political
history. Each volume avoids the twin temptations either to unite the two
poles in a Hegelian-Marxist type of philosophy of history, or to treat them
as wholly independent and external to one another, related only by empir-
ical causation. The relation that at once links and distinguishes these two
faces is often called “the political.” Although an implicit or explicit under-
standing of the political is presupposed by political thought, it becomes
manifest only in specific political or historical contexts. The singularity of
an event should not be reduced to an a posteriori expression of a circular
logic that presupposes what it wants to prove; on the contrary, the momen-
tary unity of political history with political thought is the reason that this
book series is concerned with political thought rather than with the norma-
tive logic of political philosophy.
Ute Tellmann’s Life and Money illustrates the way in which an interpre-
tive history of the political encourages a critical perspective on contempo-
rary political life. She explains in her preface that this project resulted
from her “dissatisfaction with the disciplinary bounds of political theory”
(vii). The two poles that her concise title binds together express the
theoretical presuppositions of the two economic thinkers whose work she
examines: Robert Thomas Malthus and John Maynard Keynes. Her knowl-
edge of the economic literature, its context, as well as the political debates
from which it emerged is wide and her eye for the singular is perceptive.
Her research aims to understand what she calls the “quasi-ontological”
difference between the economic and the economy itself (5). The economic,
she explains, “forms the very condition of possibility of [an author’s] argu-
mentation” (165). The study of its particular historical expression “makes
one wonder how else one could have negotiated and debated this ‘critical
space’ of the economic” (192). This difference, to which she refers frequently,
gives rise to Tellmann’s repeated references to the “malleability” of the
economic.
Although she also refers to the existence of a “political difference” and
discusses “the political dimension of economics” (27), which is based on
the interdependence of the political and the economic, Tellmann does not
develop this part of her interpretation, perhaps because her book is “largely
inspired by and indebted to Foucault’s work” (31). Yet her subtitle, “The
Genealogy of the Liberal Economy and the Displacement of Politics,”
suggests the need to explain how the economic came to exist as a chal-
lenge to political thought after the exhaustion of what had been called
political economy in the eighteenth century. This is the genealogical
question addressed in Part I, which illustrates the way that “life” came to
define the economic. Malthus is crucial to Tellmann’s reconstruction even
though his work was less important for the discipline of economics proper
than that of Ricardo, for example. Malthus’s insistence on the power of
necessity, the immanence of scarcity, and the search for future security can
be said to mark the “displacement of politics.”
Part I illustrates the breadth of Tellmann’s analysis. Its goal is to show
that, despite its own claims, classical liberalism is not based simply on eco-
nomic considerations. The three chapters that demonstrate this thesis are
summarized here briefly. The first edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Princi-
ple of Population was published in 1798, when the political upheavals of the
French revolution were still felt; by the time its sixth edition appeared in
1826, the economic had acquired its autonomy, delimiting the sphere of
necessity that politics could not violate. Perhaps the most telling expres-
sion of the shift is Malthus’s insistence, during the debates on the abolition
of the Poor Laws, that there is no “right to live.” Such a right, he argues,
would return people to a savage state in which they are caught in the
[viii] Foreword
immediacy of the desire for consumption, unable to conceive the need to
prepare for the future; as a result, they multiply too rapidly, lives of plenty
give way to conditions of scarcity, and eventually natural death must fol-
low. Civilization entails the ability to put off desire, and its maintenance
depends on fear of a future that has no guarantee. Malthus’s argument
makes clear that “liberalism” is not based on principles of laissez-faire or
property rights.1 The recognition of necessity becomes the key to a pros-
perous future that preserves the lives of the living (by means of colonial
expansion if necessary). As a result, the unit of economic evaluation must
be the “population” whose ways and needs liberal government must take
into account. In this way, government of the economic leaves no place for
the political.
Part II focuses on the centrality of “money” to the definition of the
economic in Keynes’s thought. Its three chapters are inversely symmetri-
cal to Part I. There is a critical movement away from austere surrender to
the forces of necessity, followed by the liberation of what Keynes called
the “vital spirits” of economic and monetary speculation. These spirits are
tamed in turn by a macroeconomic neoliberal “anti-political economy”
(167), which recaptures the liberal idea that population offers a national
bounded space in which experts define the measure of (and therefore the
allocation of) wealth. The parallels between the two parts of Tellmann’s
genealogical reconstruction are of course not exact; she is writing a work
of political thought. But that is precisely the reason that these parallels are
so thought-provoking.
The critique of the liberal culture of austerity in the late nineteenth
century called into question classical economic logic based on scarcity,
necessity, and the promise of future stability. Keynes was part of the move-
ment of cultural modernism;2 he also wrote the critical Treatise on Probabil-
ity (1921). The centrality of money to his theory of the economic reflects
these influences. Just as modernity turns around the perception of the
individual subject who experiences a reality that is fragmented and in
which fixity, certainty, and totality are impossible, so too Keynes replaced
the classical theory of money, in which money is a mere representation of
real values, with a dynamic and openly pluralist conception. Keynes takes
account of what Tellmann calls the “material temporalities of money,”
which permit, for example, the invention of new forms of credit and debt.
As she points out, there was good reason to call Keynes the “Einstein of
economics” (23). The modern vision of the economic, Keynes predicted,
Foreword [ix]