This course explores the politics of money through a series of foundational and topical texts.
At least since the introduction of coinage into the ancient world, money was not just regarded as an economic tool of convenience but also as an institution of societal value. Key figures in the history of political thought thus considered currency as a constitutive political institution analogous to law and speech. This course recovers these debates across a range of canonical and less canonical texts, asks how they were forgotten, and traces the politics of money into the present. The course begins with Aristotle and ends with digital currencies.
