But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today?
With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings together some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.
But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today?
With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings together some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.
Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money
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Overview
But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today?
With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings together some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2017 |
| Series: | Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 374 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Christopher Müller is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University.
,
Aidan Tynan is a Lecturer in the Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy. He is the author of Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (2012).
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Contributors
Richard Dienst, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University
Nicky Marsh, Professor of English, University of Southampton
Arthur Bradley, Reader, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Philip Goodchild, Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Nottingham University
Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor, The New School
Hollis Phelps, Assistant Professor of Religion, University of Mount Olive
Benjamin Noys, Reader in English, University of Chichester
Joshua Ramey, Assistant Professor, Grinnell College
Indradeep Ghosh, Assistant Professor of Economics, Haverford College
Josh Robinson, Lecturer, Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
Peter Sedgwick, Reader, Cardiff School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
Bernard Stiegler, Founder of Institut de recherche et d'innovation (IRI), Centre Georges-Pompidou, Visiting Professor Goldsmiths
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The ascendancy of finance
Toward a concept of Seignioral power
Joseph Vogl
Translated by Mareile Pfannebecker
At the end of the seventeenth century, in the era of the emerging political economy, a touching story set in the mid-sixteenth century was making the rounds. It referred to the fate of Emperor Charles V and his bourgeois financiers. One version went something like this: On his travels, Charles V once made a stop at Augsburg. The Fuggers, known for their fabulous wealth, showed their deference to the emperor with spectacular hospitality; a bundle of cinnamon sticks, a spice that was then one of the most expensive commodities, was hung in a fireplace. After the emperor had been shown a promissory note for a very significant sum, signed by himself, it was burnt just as the cinnamon sticks were ignited. They were now spreading 'a fragrance and light, which were the sweeter and the more pleasant to the emperor, as by them he saw himself freed from a debt; which, given his financial situation, he could only have paid with difficulty and which was, in this way, elegantly offered as a gift'.
This anecdote, put into circulation by French art theorist André Félibien in 1685, is probably strictly apocryphal; that it is nonetheless significant becomes apparent in its correspondence to a number of related episodes. Similar tales are told of merchants from Genoa or Antwerp; the sums of money vary considerably, but every time, the story ends with the burning of the imperial promissory note. However reconciliatory this circulation of offerings to the benefit of the imperial coffers may appear, the spectacular gesture and the cancellation of the prince's debt are merely the surface of these stories. Félibien's anecdote, in particular, presents an involvement of the financier with the sovereign, the dissolution of which tends towards the tragi-comical.
Aside from the fact that the anecdote is fitting for a time in which the bankruptcies of the Habsburgs were proverbial, it presents a scene in which prince and finance dynasty change position in a surprising manner. In the first instance, it evokes all those borrowed sums, from bribes for the imperial election to the cost of his military campaigns that put Charles V in the debt to the Fuggers and others. Meanwhile, the pyrotechnical turn reverses the political order. Burning cinnamon sticks demonstrates luxury and unproductive wastefulness; the burnt bill of exchange marks an early modern liquidation of debts, and thus the simple fact that the sovereign no longer owes credit. In the patrician abode, the emperor is confronted, in the same measure, with the display of courtly luxury and the reminder of his insolvency and his unfulfilled obligation – a move that must appal the sovereign. Sovereignty understood as a measure for the minimization of dependency, as the manifestation of self-unity and as the embodiment of the final authority renders the trader's gift an act of usurpation. The merchants' gift suspends all reciprocity; it interrupts the circle of gift and return of the gift and marks a decisive asymmetry. While seventeenth-century doctrines of sovereignty position the prince and his treasury as the ultimate creditor, the burnt promissory note itself claims the role of ultimate, but significantly, private creditor in the relationship between prince and finance capital. Something is given to the emperor that was not his; he receives nothing, which is what he owns. This is the precarious resolution of the situation: in the Augsburg scene of Félibien's narration, the sovereign is made once more what he already was, that is, the ruler of the Holy Roman emperor by the grace of capital. The interest in this little tale lies in how the generous performance of the financier provokes a referential confusion about where and in whom the position of sovereign power will be embodied.
The anecdote also reflects the difficult condition of public households in the Renaissance and their entanglement with contemporary finance capital. It articulates an irritation already apparent in the writing of early modern theories of state and sovereignty by Jean Bodin, Cardin Le Bret or Charles Loyseau. For however much these theories strain to convert a multitude of authorities and privileges into a unified political format and to define 'the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth', the settling of fiscal questions takes up a precarious place within them. On the one hand, coinage prerogative, tax collection and public budget are claimed as essential markers of sovereignty. On the other hand, they differ from other privileges of sovereignty – such as legislation, supreme judicial power, the right to pardon and others – in that they lead into a controversial and murky area made up by unclear responsibilities, peculiar considerations, complex decisions, uncomfortable commitments. Questions of coinage, for example, point to a sphere of activity where trade in offices, intervention of lease-holders, informants and hangers-on of all kinds threaten the erosion of sovereign state power. The levying of long-term tributes conjures up conflicts with bourgeois property rights as well as concerns about the independence of princely households. Finally, the negotiation of a state budget on the basis of credit is accompanied by a horror of its own kind – the absolute limit of absolute power comes into view. The cycle of loan and debt servicing caused by credit – an evil that Bodin saw to originate with Francis I – becomes the embodiment of political pathology. It signifies the 'fever' of statecraft, the 'ruin' of the prince; it marks the place where sovereignty's monopoly on power is undermined by economic dependency.
Evidently, national finance raises a subject that challenges the theoretical development of early modern doctrines on sovereignty in a particular manner; it provokes more than one inconsistency and comes up against incompatibilities with the unified format of sovereign power. There is a noticeable resistance of objects that makes the theoretical text hesitate, and that testifies to their difficult fit within the concept of the sovereign who embodies the state. It shows an early concern about a sensitive sacrifice of sovereign privileges. These difficulties appear to be due to the fact that the fiscal complex presents a key motive for the consolidation of early modern state power, and at the same time marks its limits or fault lines. Fiscal matters take up a critical position that resists resolution within a homogenous idea of the political. Three basic elements – the idea of the treasury [Fiskus], the state of coinage politics and the role of public debt – will show how early modern finance emerges in close correspondence to political tasks, how along with this a strategic field of a different quality emerges and how this field appears as a politico-economic zone of indifference, which cannot be accommodated within current concepts of political power.
First. Roman law already made the fiscus, the 'purse' or 'coffers', subject to complex differentiations that reflected the relation between imperial private fortune and state assets. At stake were questions concerning the rightful property of the treasury, legal limitation periods, inalienability, relations between the treasury and the immortal unity of the empire. The treasury becomes a strange object, the classification of which remains debated, unclear or riddled with exceptions. So, as Otto von Gierke notes, in the Roman Empire the fiscus Caesaris, the emperor's private treasury, is consolidated with the aerarium of the res publica, the state assets; in a certain sense it is nationalized, and yet it remains subject to the rules of procedure under private law. Yet it is precisely by its own nationalization that the treasury models itself on an idea of personhood under private law and thus introduces a strange doubling in the form of imperial power. While the state as such 'elevates itself ever more decisively above all law, the state as fiscal entity, as treasury, subjects itself to the law, and goes as private entity among private persons'. At the same time, the private position of the treasury was compromised by a whole sequence of exceptions, which again mark a tension between private and public in the treasury itself. In some ways it remained unclear who or what – res publica, emperor or private person – was acting in the name of the treasury.
In the modern era, the steadfast link between treasury and state is demonstrable; nonetheless, wavering regulations of this kind persisted. For example, fiscal law is understood as emerging from imperial power, the summum imperium, and as part of sovereignty, superioritas. The treasury is in itself a mark of sovereignty and can be attributed to all sovereign authorities – princes, states, free cities – in the same measure. The bearer of rights to national assets coincides with the subject of national jurisdiction; the treasury overlaps with the person of the sovereign. Yet, it is in its impulse of sovereignty that the treasury takes the form of an independent, 'personified fund' or asset. It becomes, as Giercke notes, an immortal and abstract 'creature of terminology', a 'fictive legal personality', which survives its changing representatives. It faces the sovereign as a sign of sovereignty and binds him to specific duties – for example, the prohibition of the disposal of national assets. The treasury takes up an eccentric position and remains, as a defining instance of sovereignty, beyond the sovereign grasp.
Where the treasury is positioned in contradistinction to the ruler as a private person, but also to the sovereign as bearer of national jurisdiction, a distinction is also introduced in the fiscal realm itself. Here, some areas (like coinage rights) are unequivocally assigned to the sovereign authority of an inalienable and indivisible power of the state; others (like mining and tolls) are subject to bare property laws – a peculiar combination or confusion between sovereign jurisdiction and private law. The division between legal transactions of state and plain business is provoked by the instance of the treasury, yet made problematic at the same time. Items relating to the treasury somehow belong to the jurisdiction of the sovereign but cannot finally be isolated from the activity of private business. Bodin still renders public domains and national assets as bound to the status of the sovereign; accordingly, they are 'sacred, inviolable and inalienable' (saint, sacré, et inalienable); nonetheless, fiscal authority cannot be immediately claimed as a marker of sovereignty, if it refers to public assets as well as to the prince's private property. And when, in the seventeenth century, the maxim 'that only the sovereign prince has the right to a treasury' has established itself, it is just this prerogative that is immediately bound up with limiting commitments and liabilities.
One might say: attempts to frame the problem of sovereignty in a monolithic way are pervaded by resistances that go back to fiscal matters and the problem of the fiscal objects related to them. On the one hand, the treasury is allotted a domain of authority by virtue of essential marks of sovereignty. On the other hand, this domain immediately divides into distinct private and public tasks; it cannot, or can only under great conceptual strain, be associated with the unified form of sovereignty. On the one hand, the treasury takes shape as an impersonal, ahistorical and non-transferable entity, a quasi-sacred object, which, like the sovereign, is placed above the law and marks, as 'soul of the state', a sphere of supra-personal continuity. On the other hand, the treasury creates an independent legal personality, wherewith a tension between sovereign jurisdiction and the 'sacred' domain of finance unfolds: the quasi-infinite duration of sovereignty is made dependent on the quasi-infinite duration of the treasury. In this way, a process has been completed which, as Ernst Kantorowicz notes, a decidedly secular entity like the treasury is awarded the ability to represent the invincible aspects of prince and state. At the same time, cracks become apparent in the concept of sovereign power: treasury [Fiskus] or finance appears as the scene on which political power, business transactions and private citizenship are peculiarly intertwined. Before this backdrop, the special status of the early modern treasury is clearly marked by the way in which it coincides with the arcane domain of sovereignty and yet establishes its particular arena of agency and power.
Second. Similar rifts and interferences are recognizable in an unquestionable sovereign fiscal power, the coinage prerogative. Until the early modern period, coin and monetary functions – like measures and weights in general – were understood as the property of the regent, which secured a large share of the prince's income. Beside the notorious manipulation of coins and coin renovations, this was insured by the levying of the seigniorage, which was due to the minting authority and was extracted as a sort of tax. Profit from coinage and production cost made up the difference between the nominal value and the cost of the metal of the coins in circulation. The coinage prerogative included the determination of the legal market value, dictated the conditions of circulation and set the confines for private business transactions such as the trade in precious metals. In the mints, usually set up as private enterprises that were awarded privileges, the production of money as the transformation of commodities, or rather, raw materials, into legal tender was determined by a close interlacing of business and princely interests. This is not to say that the seigniorage was one isolated privilege developed in connection to monopoly-like production sites. The relation to sovereign statehood rather lies in the fact that the prince standardized the units of measure circulating in his territories and authenticated the reference value. And, until the sixteenth century, the fiscal levying of monetary duties meant that the arbitrary act of sovereign power – represented as valor impositus impressed on the coins as the nominal value – signified the legitimation of that other power. The coin is the sovereign's stage; his name or minted portrait shows that the coin is 'entirely subjected to the authority of the prince, who prescribes its material, form, rate, weight and price according to his own pleasure'. The funding of the treasury began the mechanisms of early modern monetary circulation as well as the institution of territorially bound methods of payment.
In this combination of factors, an impressive interlacing of political rulership and private gain has taken place. A situation ensued in which acts of sovereignty lead to the development of early money- and finance markets and unleashed a double momentum. One part is set into motion by the sovereign coinage prerogative. While cash of all kinds circulated unhindered across state borders, the methods of payment fixed via the coinage prerogative were only valid within the realm in question. This meant that in a given territory, the rate of foreign coins was not determined according to the nominal value of the originating country (metal cost plus seigniorage), but according to the metal value of the coin in question; the exchange rate thus was the result of a transaction where foreign coins relate to legal tender as commodity. This situation makes sense as a contingent effect of emergent statehood in the Renaissance and was caused by acts of sovereignty, that is, by the territorial standardization of the coinage system.
(Continues…)
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