What Money Wants: An Economy of Desire

319 Pages·2014·5.185 MB·English

by  Noam Yuran

WHAT

MONEY
WANTS

WHAT
MONEY
WANTS
AN ECONOMY OF DESIRE
Noam Yuran
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS * STANFORD, CALIFORNIA
To my parents, Hava and Yossef
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.
This book was published with the support of the Israel Science Foundation.
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for its support of scholarship by first-time authors. For more information, please see www.sup.org/
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No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
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without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yuran, Noam, author.
What money wants : an economy of desire / Noam Yuran.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-8592-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-8593-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Money—Philosophy. 2. Desire—Economic aspects. 3. Economics—Philosophy. I. Title.
HG220.3.Y83 2014
330.01'9—dc23
2013021463
ISBN 978-0-8047-8889-2 (electronic)
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond Pro
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
Preface by Keith Hart ix
Introduction 1
1 Ontology: The Specter of Greed 13
Part I: Between Orthodox and Heterodox Economics 13
Part II: What Is a Social Object? 42
2 History: Fantasies of a Capitalist 79
3 Mystery: The Materiality of Symbols 125
4 Revelation: Weber’s Midas 181
5 The Economic Sublime: The Fantastic Colors of Money 223
Notes 269
Bibliography 283
Index 291

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The economy teaches us that having sufficiently large debts that can no longer
be settled is actually a blissful situation. I acknowledge such happy debts to
the many people who have helped me during the work on this book.
Haim Marantz, who supervised my PhD dissertation on which this book
is based, is endowed with a generous spirit, which only true teachers have.
This book could not have materialized without him. His insistence that I add
a chapter on Veblen proved essential to the project. I thank him for his wise
and patient advice. I wholeheartedly thank Slavoj Žižek, who also supervised
my work. Apart from being a source of intellectual influence, Slavoj took the
time to read and comment on several versions of the manuscript.
Keith Hart encouraged me to publish the work. I greatly benefited from
the long conversations we had and from his wide perspective on economic
thought. I thank Arjun Appadurai for his invaluable advice after reading the
manuscript. His thoughtful comments helped me clarify the notion of history
that underlies this book. Arjun’s invitation to visit the Cultures of Finance
group at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University provided
me with an opportunity for an inspiring intellectual engagement. I especially
want to thank two members of the group, Robert Wosnitzer and Benjamin
Lee, for their interest and advice on the project. They helped me to better un-
derstand the connections between finance and consumer culture.
While working on the book, I received a research fellowship from the
Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. I thank Adi Ophir, the
co-director of the center, for many years of dialogue and support. The col-
lective work at the center is an ongoing stimulation for me. I especially en-
joyed three years of lively discussions with the political economy research
group there. I thank the members of the group: Yuval Yonay, Dotan Leshem,
Acknowledgments viii
Anat Rosenberg, Roy Kreitner, Oz Gore, Michael Zakim, Shaul Hayoun, Uzi
Livneh, Oleg Komlik, Tahel Frosh, and Rami Kaplan. I especially want to
thank my friends in the researchers’ room at the center Dikla Bytner—Tali
Friedman, Uri Eran, Ori Rotlevy, Moriya Ben Barak, and Yael Atiya—for
their jolly company and for enduring my pointless complaints during the
work on the book. Remember, there is no despair in the world whatsoever.
Many colleagues and teachers kindly shared their knowledge and thoughts
with me. I especially thank Moshe Zuckermann, Arie Arnon, Gideon
Freudenthal, Anat Matar, and Eva Illouz.
I am thankful to Evergreen Venture Partners, which accepted me to its
fellowship program. The turbulent seminar headed by Doron Avital was an
intellectual challenge. I thank the members of the seminar: Elad Mentovich,
Oriel Bergig, Romi Mikulinsky, and Roly Belfer.
Thoughts about money are of an obsessive nature as many of my friends
have learned. I am grateful to good friends with whom I shared my thoughts.
I thank Eyal Dotan for the conversation that sprouted the idea for this book.
I thank my friend Oded Shechter for many years of common thought and
shared ideas. I thank Joshua Simon, partner on many roads, and Yitzhak Laor,
Gavin Steingo, and Yuval Kremnitzer. I thank my fellow PhD students in the
Philosophy Department at Ben Gurion University: Ariel Sarid and Sergeiy
Sandler.
The staff at Stanford University Press made the publishing process a pleas-
ant experience. Emily-Jane Cohen put her trust in the project from the begin-
ning. I thank her for her kind support and care. I thank Emma S. Harper and
Judith Hibbard for making all procedures so easy. Many of the words in this
book are Leslie Rubin’s. Her work went beyond copyediting, and she provided
valuable insights to the book.
Finally, I would like to thank my family. My brothers Hanan and Nadav
Yoran were involved with my work, and I thank them for their constant care.
I thank my wife Sivan for her love and patience during the long project and
my children Itamar, Alona, and Omer for being there.
PREFACE
Keith Hart
During a period around 1900, five books came out, each of them offering a
radically new perspective on the modern economic system that was then given
a name, “capitalism.” They were V. I. Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism
in Russia (1899), which is still the best available account of capitalist develop-
ment in backward areas; Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899), which launched the study of consumption and institutional econom-
ics; Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900), which has a claim to
being the most profound meditation on the topic since Karl Marx; Werner
Sombart’s Der Moderner Kapitalismus (1902), which is the original source for
the name of our economic system; and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), which is possibly the most famous essay in
sociology ever written.
All of these were in some kind of dialogue with Karl Marx’s work that
was published in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also a time when the
theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and cubism were being formed. Not
much later the Federal Reserve and the first fully-automated production line
saw daylight in 1913, and twentieth-century capitalism was born.
Noam Yuran’s book is likewise in dialogue with Marx, and it draws heav-
ily on Veblen and Weber, but only indirectly or not at all on the others. We
are living through a watershed in world economic history when the doctrines
of orthodox economics have been discredited by financial crisis. It ought
to be a time of intellectual renewal and discovery, but the contours of such
change are not yet obvious. By revisiting that epoch just over a century ago
and, especially, through his interpretation of Marx’s theory and method,
Yuran may well have produced a classic of our era. His argument is by no
means solely an exercise in intellectual archaeology, nor is it an explanation