Philip Goodchild is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety and the editor of Difference in the Philosophy of Religion and Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy.

THEOLOGY OF MONEY

By Philip Goodchild

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4438-4

Contents

Preface to the U.S. Edition……………………………….xiIntroduction…………………………………………….1One Power………………………………………………29Two The End of Modernity…………………………………43Three Ecology of Money…………………………………..73Four Politics of Money…………………………………..123Five Theology of Money…………………………………..165Six Metaphysics and Credit……………………………….201Seven The Price of Credit………………………………..225Eight A Modest Proposal: Evaluative Credit…………………241Conclusion Of Redemption………………………………….257Notes…………………………………………………..263Bibliography…………………………………………….281Index…………………………………………………..293

Chapter One

POWER

MODERN THOUGHT, with its Cartesian heritage, has distinguished two kinds of power. There is the purely physical power deriving from gravity, solar radiation, and chemical and atomic bonds. It is released through combustion and muscular exertion and is found in power stations and military hardware. Then there is the purely human power of the will. It is expressed in speech and in action and is found in markets and in nation-states. Modern understandings of politics normally require both conceptions of power. Human will may act on human will through the image or threat of physical power. This is evident above all in Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political, which is concerned with the distinction between friend and enemy. For Schmitt, war is the most extreme political means, and as such, it discloses the conceptual distinction that underlies every political idea: the possibility of distinguishing between friend and enemy. Political concepts have a polemical character because they ultimately refer to the real possibility of physical killing. The decisive political power is the authority to make war and so to publicly dispose of the lives of people, whether of the lives of the enemy or of one’s own people, in sacrifice. The authority of will over will here derives from no other foundation than the exercise of physical power.

It is necessary to complicate this duality with a third kind of power. War involves the concentrated disposal of physical power and its outcome is generally determined by an accurate distribution or restriction of such power. As General Erwin Rommel remarked in North Africa in 1942: “The first essential condition for an army to stand the strain of battle is an adequate stock of weapons, petrol and ammunition. In fact, the battle is fought and decided by the quartermasters before the shooting begins. The bravest men can do nothing without guns, the guns nothing without plenty of ammunition; and neither guns nor ammunition are of much use in mobile warfare unless there are vehicles with sufficient petrol to haul them around.” War may be regarded as a particular case of the power to distribute and exercise physical force. Such a distribution is at once physical and ideal in that it concerns the location and orientation of force. The political, more broadly, may take as its foundation the determination of the use of resources. While war enables the possibility of an enemy, sharing resources enables the possibility of a friend. While economics concerns the most profitable distribution of scarce resources, political economy concerns just distribution. Politics, as the exercise of human will on human will, is grounded on political economy through which the other is determined as a member of a class or as a friend or enemy. Collective physical force depends on a prior appeal to “right” that unites friends against enemies. Prior to the distinction between friend and enemy, political economy must also appeal to principles through which distribution will be ordered and limited, perhaps principles of ownership, right, or justice. Beneath the strength of physical force lie customs, traditions, and markets that determine concentrations of resources. Privileged distributions may occur through kinship, regions, language groups, currency areas, or nation-states, for example. The political, as Schmitt concedes, can derive its energy from the most varied human endeavors, including religious, economic, and moral dimensions. Here we have a third kind of power, the intangible “energy” of the political, irreducible to physical force. It is the authority that guides and authorizes the action of will on will. It is this energy that is the subject matter of a political theology.

Such energy, as a supplement to the will, cannot be encompassed within modernity’s conception of humanity as universal political subjects. As soon as the will is given priority, any claims of the “authority” that energizes the will must be dismissed by the will. Schmitt himself exposed the consequences of such universalism: in its effort to include all, it remains an exclusive category. He argued that the political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world, for the political entity presupposes the real existence of an enemy and thus of another political entity. As a consequence, “To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can therefore be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” In a similar way, modern political thought, when it makes the political subject the universal category, excludes consideration of the energy of the political. While appealing to such energy in the name of universality, peace, justice, progress, civilization, democracy, or humanity, it deploys such energy purely in the name of the will. It becomes both arbitrary and totalitarian. Excluding deference to the authority or energy that lends validity to the democratic subject, it becomes a totalitarian denunciation of all authoritarianisms, drawing on its own repressed reservoir of ideological energy. It neglects the bases of the political in the influence over the human will of both physical power and the energy of the political. Authority, far from being abolished by democracy, recurs in a disguised form where its power is unlimited. The nature of such power in the contemporary world remains a theological-political problem.

MODERN HUMANISM

Modern political thought has been humanistic in three related senses. First, the human is constituted as independent of the divine. True power is not to be absorbed from sacred places, persons, objects, or rituals. The claims of theocracies or mythical cosmologies to embody the good are rejected as superstition. Spectral and occult powers are regarded as illusion. The will must be liberated from beliefs concerning participation in the good in nature just as it is liberated from the need to ward off spectral powers. In a secular polity, the good is something that must be willed. Such an emancipation or enlightenment occurs through the second sense of humanism: the human subject is constituted as such through rational self-reflection as a self-determining agent. The human at once distinguishes itself from the animal and liberates itself from superstitious hopes and fears through its reason. By means of reason, it represents the order in nature and imposes order on nature. The power of the will is exercised through representation. Yet the power of the will may only be confirmed as a power through the third sense of humanism: the human subject demonstrates its mastery over an external nature. The subject becomes a subject by exercising itself on an object, and the success of humanism depends on the continuation of this power of mastery. The fate of modern political thought rests on demonstrations of its effectiveness; it rests on a conception of power as mastery; it rests on the nonexistence of invisible powers beyond those of physics and the will.

Three key elements have characterized the modern Western attempt to dominate the unruly forces of nature. The scientific revolution aimed at extracting the ideal form of physical law from the behavior of matter to subject matter to abstract prediction and control; the technological-industrial revolution aimed at subjecting production to the force of the combustion of preserved organic power, together with management by rational recording, calculation, and communication, to maximize efficiency and output; and the capitalist and free-market revolutions aimed at liberating human choice from subordination to traditional or natural ends. The natural world has been mastered by science, technology, and economics. Should this mastery come to an end, one would have to inquire whether modern man is truly reasonable or truly secular.

At the turn of the millennium, the progress of humanism has run up against insuperable limits in each of these domains. The new sciences of chaos and complexity demonstrate how the behavior of matter frequently exceeds all powers of prediction. Science no longer gives mastery. The ecological crisis demonstrates how economic production is dependent on a broader framework of ecological cycles to supply its resources and absorb its waste, cycles that can easily become unstable. Technology no longer gives mastery. The globalization of the capitalist free-market economy demonstrates how social and personal choices are governed by autonomous processes driven by debt, profit, and the control of consumer desire rather than ordered by humane values and a substantive rationality. Economics no longer gives mastery.

Such practical impotence exposes the limits of modern political theory. Committed to a notion of power as mastery-humanity exerting its own intrinsic force rather than appealing to authority-it confines its own operation to representation. As pure theory or reflective knowledge, it aims to represent faithfully the actual or desired political constitution of reality so that a sovereign will may exercise its judgments. Theory is written on behalf of a judging will, whether this is the governing agent of a nation-state, the private will of a democratic subject within civil society, or the collective force of a revolutionary organization. Theory informs sovereign speech and action. But it is doubtful whether this notion of power should constitute the norm for politics. As Pierre Manent points out, the deliberate and rational constitution of the modern liberal state has been exceptional in the history of politics. It is by no means clear that the primary vectors of power continue to pass through sovereign human agency. There are many other thoughtful modes of exercising power in human relations apart from the alliance between representation and sovereignty found in judgment-to name just a few, provision, production, reproduction, possession, association, legislation, normalization, violence, promise, threat, selection, suggestion, persuasion, information, funding, moralizing, praying, or even simply giving attention. Yet power cannot be restricted to human relations. Beyond human agency, human life is also shaped by the agency of non-human powers, such as material flows of heat, clean air, fresh water, fertile soil, electricity, fossilized energy, pollution, genetic mutation, disease, and nutrition. Human populations are dependent on the powers of populations of domestic farm animals. The human will may only operate in alliance with these other human and nonhuman powers. It is doubtful whether this alliance between the will and the host of other powers can ever be reduced to representation and mastery. There is, however, a third domain of relative impotence of the will. The subject is afflicted from the inside by beliefs and desires. While the subject may flatter itself that it has selected its beliefs and desires through its own sovereign and rational choice, beliefs and desires exert their own specific power of attraction. Flowing through populations as cultures, political opinions, religions, fashions, ideals, goals, or anxieties, for example, these autonomous flows of beliefs and desires may speak through the political subject like a ventriloquist. Reason may insulate itself against some of these flows when it finds inconsistencies between the order that derives from them and the order of perception. It has little power against the rationalizations that emerge from beliefs and desires when they act as subjects themselves, ordering representation according to their aims. Then, as David Hume remarked, reason is only a slave of the passions. It is necessary to explore this third, meta-human dimension of power, for authority and right belong within the realm of belief.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF REPRESENTATION

An awakening to the active forces of these three broad ranges of power exposes the limits of subjective sovereignty. The mastery achieved through representation is an illusory mastery, for the quality-selectivity-through which representation achieves its power is also the cause of its impotence. In the presentation of the world to the mind, the mind is subjected to each perception, impulse, and orientation. It is helpless before the arising of each image, reaction, and desire. Yet in the representation of the world to the mind, the mind associates ideas, whether in accordance with their intrinsic nature or in accordance with its own understanding. In representation, ideas are liberated from the conditions of their arising in the course of time. They may be reproduced in the mind at will. In the act of selection, they are freed from external powers and subjected to the power of the mind alone. The mind imposes order on the represented world. Passing through an order of reasons, an association of representations, the mind may determine its own will. Reproducing objects in its own imagination, the mind invests and fixes its own desire. In short, through representation the mind becomes a subject to itself. In imagination it constructs its own sovereignty in reason, will, and desire. This selectivity is at once the construction of a limited domain of sovereignty and a broader domain of ignorance and impotence. The failure to represent and respond to every force in the order of the mind leads to its impotence before that which exceeds representation. There is always a remainder, epitomized by the force of the course of time itself, for if representation is a reproduction of images in the mind, it cannot include the contemporary presentation of perceptions, impulses, and orientations. Modern reason is a hesitation, a membrane, an interruption; it reproduces the world in the theater of the imagination, where the order of the sovereign subject is maintained. Yet the sovereignty of reason exists in the imagination alone. There is one thing that must be excluded a priori from the representation of the sovereign subject: its impotence. This is not to say that one cannot represent oneself as impotent, but this very representation of oneself as impotent is generated from within the mind. It is in practice an expression of the mind’s power.

A belief in the sovereignty of the subject through its rational ordering of representation does not emerge without some external support or confirmation. Several social roles may serve as a model for imagining the mastery of the sovereign subject: the patriarchal father, the absolute despot, the chief executive officer, the owner of property, the artist, the animal trainer, the craftsperson, or the wealthy consumer, for example. Each may form the basis for imagining an unfettered liberty and power over a specific domain. On closer inspection, however, each of these social roles exists in a complex web of mutual influence and interaction with its correlative field. To attain true mastery in each case, it is necessary to hold the capacity to break off the relation with the mastered object. Thus, the owner of property is absolved from the corresponding obligations for care and maintenance of property by disposing of it, selling it in exchange, or allowing it to decay. Ownership is the right to dispose of property. The consumer exercises sovereignty in the selection of products by refusing to purchase others on offer. Choice is rejection. The craftsperson rejects recalcitrant materials. The despot exercises sovereignty through power over life and death. Sovereignty is destruction. Sovereignty is a relation that exists only in its suspension. It is exercised primarily as a threat, but the execution of the threat consists in dissolving the relation. Such power may be exercised through violence, through severance, or through flight. Yet as the image of negation, sovereign power exists only in the imagination. In practice, the mind may be subjected to both physical force and the force of authority.

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