The Social Life of Money by Dodd Nigel

Author:Dodd, Nigel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

EMPIRE

Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000, 2001 cited here)—alongside Multitude (2005) and Commonwealth (2009)—offers a distinctive account of globalization that embraces its political and cultural dimensions. Hardt and Negri argue that during the twentieth century, modern imperialism, with the nation-state as its focal point, gave way to a new configuration of power: a supranational order that consists not only of global markets but of regulators, too. This order is “Empire.” It is characterized by a new geopolitical system whose components radically restructure the political forms of old nation-states. The emergence of Empire gives rise to new modes of warfare as well as distinctive forms of protest and opposition, which Hardt and Negri seek to theorize using Spinoza’s concept of the multitude (Hardt and Negri 2005). Theoretically, their arguments also draw on notions of biopolitics (Foucault 2008a) and the assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). They also propose a reinterpretation of Marxism that could certainly be described as post-Fordist, and perhaps even as postmodernist and post-structuralist. The argument is interesting to monetary theory for three key reasons. First, they draw attention to the political—not just economic—ramifications of the increasingly global forms that have been taken by monetary and financial instruments during the past half century. Second, in exploring those forms, they establish theoretically intriguing connections between Marx’s theory of capital (which frames their overarching approach) and theories of power, such as that of Foucault, which enable them to reconfigure notions of political agency insofar as it operates within the interstices among capital, labor, and sovereign power. Third, and building on this reconfiguration, they use a Spinozian concept of the multitude to grasp diffused collective agency on shifting sites of radical engagement in the global age. This Spinozian concept poses intriguing questions that resonate with our own ongoing discussion of how Simmel’s characterization of money as a claim upon society might be recast in an era of postnational monies.

Empire is the political form of globalization. According to Hardt and Negri, the journey toward it involved the displacement of nation-state functions to other levels and domains (Hardt and Negri 2001: 307). Capitalist institutions have not replaced the state; rather a new form of sovereignty has emerged, composed of “national and supranational organisms under a single logic of rule” (Hardt and Negri 2001: xii, italics added). To understand this logic, we need to revisit arguments about what drives the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary capitalism. Although Hardt and Negri’s analysis connects with Harvey’s notion of the spatial fix, they also suggest that its patterns of mobility are creating a new geography that cannot be explained by capitalist accumulation alone (Hardt and Negri 2001: 397). Empire as they conceive it cannot simply be extrapolated from the old Westphalian model, as if a global metastate was in formation. In this sense, Empire is a politico-economic hybrid.

To theorize this hybrid, Hardt and Negri reach back to Polybius’s Histories, particularly his characterization of imperial Rome in terms of the relationship among three “good powers”: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Polybius argued that

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