The Currency of Justice: Aristotle on Money as a Political Institution of Civic Reciprocity (currently under review)

Abstract: This article reconstructs Aristotle’s neglected account of currency (nomisma) as a constitutive aspect of political justice. For Aristotle, the very possibility of a political community depends on its ability to foster habitual bonds of reciprocity. Conventionally, speech has been seen to fulfill this role. In this article, I argue that, besides speech, coinage issued by the polis was a major tool of political reciprocity in the classical Greek world. By placing Aristotle’s account of currency and reciprocity in the Nicomachean Ethics in its Athenian context, currency emerges not merely as a medium of economic exchange but also as the conventional measure of excess and deficiency necessary for the administration of political justice and a constitutive pillar of any political community.
 
Paper available upon request.
 

Max Weber, Politics, and the Crisis of Historicism (co-authored with Adam Tooze)

Abstract: This paper argues that recent realist invocations of Max Weber often rely on a highly unrealistic reading of Weber’s realism. The first and most immediate difficulty is how to escape the allure of Weber’s dramatic posture of crisis. The way to productively tackle this problem, we want to suggest, is to read him with a high degree of historical awareness. Weber delivered “Politics as a Vocation” in early 1919 in the midst of a revolutionary conjuncture of dramatic proportions and his rhetoric carries with it the emotion of that moment. By building our vision of politics on Weber’s grim extrapolation of this moment of panic-ridden crisis we prolong a violently charged vision of heroic choice amidst a “polar night of icy darkness and hardness”. Perversely, it was the disastrous history of interwar Europe that seemed to confirm his bleakest predictions. But the fatalistic despair of Weber’s position was already detected by some of his closest contemporaries—such as Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich Meinecke. If Weber is placed in his historical context and if we focus on his understanding of history, he appears not straightforwardly as a door opener to a historically situated theory of political action but as an extremely telling impasse. Rather than embracing Weber this paper appreciates the wider crisis in political and historical thought at the beginning of the twentieth century with which Weber grappled and which he himself deepened.
 

From History to Evolution: Jürgen Habermas and the Philosophy of History

Abstract: This paper asks whether at the heart of Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory there stands a problematic conception of historical change. Having spent the 1960s deeply immersed in the difficulties of navigating the force field of the philosophy of history in a non-determinist manner, in the course of the 1970s Habermas decided to cut through the Gordian knot. He embraced social evolutionism, tightened a number of Kantian distinctions, and adopted a sociological analysis of society as system and lifeworld. This paper traces his move from history to evolution and suggests that Habermas ironically and unwittingly ends up replicating a number of problematic aspects of the philosophy of history on the social-evolutionary plane.

 

The Great Inflation (co-authored with Adam Tooze)

Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze, “The Great Inflation,” in Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Lutz Raphael, Thomas Schlemmer (eds.), Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart. Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).

Abstract: As the 20th century ended, a reappraisal began of the 1970s as a crucial turning point in modernity. For some historians the 1970s were marked as the moment “after the boom”. For others the epoch was defined by the shock of the global. For cultural historians it was an age of fragmentation. The 1970s were clearly an age of economic crisis, but this too could be understood in different ways. Deindustrialization and the end of Fordism were two options. Globalization another. The discovery of the limits to growth provided a resonant phrase to announce the environmental age. But, for economists and policy-makers, the 1970s stood for another type of epochal break, a revolution in monetary affairs. The end of Bretton Woods between 1971 and 1973 marked the universalization of fiat money. From the 1970s onwards, for the first time since the invention of money, nowhere, anywhere in the world was money directly anchored on gold. How would monetary systems be managed without this anchor? What would be tested in the 1970s and 1980s was a fundamental institutional question of the modern world: the relationship between capitalism, fiat money and democratic policy-making. If it is the double ending both of the postwar boom and the Great Inflation that defines our present, the history of anti-inflationism was never as simple as it appeared in narratives of a “great moderation” designed to legitimate currency policy. In light of recent events we conclude that it is time to revisit the history of the Great Inflation – both the events of the epoch and the stories told about them – and to pose the question put to modernity by Alexander Kluge. Was the refoundation of democratic capitalism through the overcoming of inflation a “a learning-process with a fatal outcome?”

 

Restructuring Democracy and the Idea of Europe (co-authored with Seyla Benhabib)

For Warren Breckman and Peter E. Gordon (eds.), The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
 

Other Work

I occasionally translate Seyla Benhabib’s work into German. In 2014, I translated her Meister Eckhart Prize Lecture and in 2012 her Leopold Lucas Prize Lecture. An abbreviated version of the latter also appeared in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.

 
 
 
 

In 2011, I assisted — in a minor capacity — in editing a collection of essays by Robert Wokler: Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and their Legacies (Princeton University Press, 2012). The volume was edited by Bryan Garsten and includes an introduction by Christopher Brooke. (The highly recommended first chapter on Rousseau and perfectible apes is available here.)