This is a book about the difficulty of thinking about money without thinking according to money. To pacify the fairy-tale magic of the money-world’s hold over us, Mason and Jayadev aim to ‘think about the long-run trajectory of the rule of money over society, and how to imagine it ending’ (269). Toward that end, Marx and Keynes are companions, but not masters. The point is less fidelity to a tradition than a ‘direction of travel’ (269).

The target of the book is familiar. Economics still teaches that money is a veil over an underlying real economy, a convenient device for exchange, a neutral measure of value, a lubricant. But Mason and Jayadev’s claim is something other than the simple insistence that ‘money matters’. Instead, they argue that money matters in three distinct senses: it has a direct effect on production and social life; it evolves according to its own logic rather than merely reflecting putative ‘real’ developments; and many of the most important economic quantities, such as GDP, debt ratios, the interest rate, capital, and so on, exist only in monetary terms (27). Their complaint extends beyond the simple lament that mainstream theory has the wrong model of money towards a more robust claim that economic thought in se repeatedly invents a phantom real object behind monetary quantities and then treats money as the imperfect name of that object.

In their pithy way, Mason and Jayadev describe the book as being about the ‘and’ in Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (13). That is, it’s about the connective tissue between money and things, payments and production, ledgers and life.

The opening move is ontological, though the authors might not center that framing themselves. Buildings have bricks, pipes, roofs, and windows. But they also have owners, prices, balance-sheet values, and expected income streams. These latter qualities are invisible prima facie, but they condition our relation to the building just as much as its physical properties do (4). The ordinary mistake is to treat size, location, and price as ontologically equivalent facts. But price is not in the building in the way that bricks are in the building. These are social facts, backed by accounting, law, coercion, and expectation.

For Mason and Jayadev, money values do not reflect real quantities pre-existing behind them: debt is not merely past consumption in excess of income; neither is capital a physical stock of tools; nor is the interest rate the price of goods today relative to goods tomorrow (14–15). Grasped on its own terms, money in money-world is a coordination device: a social anonymizer and social ledger that expands serial capacity while breaking and reconstituting human relations in often violent ways (15).

The chapters on debt and capital are where this method first appears. Debt, in the moralizing story of everyday economics, is the accumulated result of having lived beyond one’s means. Mason and Jayadev show why this is not even good accounting. Rising debt-income ratios may reflect new borrowing but also higher interest rates, slower nominal income growth, deflation, refinancing conditions, or changes in asset prices. In the post-1980 US, the rise in household debt ratios was not primarily a story about profligacy but about slower nominal income growth and persistently high interest rates after Volcker (50–4). Thus, indebtedness is not a moral outcome but a balance-sheet relation.

A similar reversal structures the chapter on capital. Capital in economic theory is still imagined as a quasi-physical stock accumulated through saving and investment. By contrast, Mason and Jayadev argue that the capital we can actually observe is monetary wealth: claims on future income streams, valued in markets. Its value changes not primarily through the accumulation of produced means of production, but through social, legal, and financial changes affecting the valuation of property rights. ‘All capital is like the title to land’ (105): a property right that permits its holder to demand payment and exercise a veto over production. By way of example, to own SpaceX is different from owning a toothbrush, insofar as the former is ‘a relationship of rule over people’ (110). This is one of the book’s better achievements. It gives ‘capital as power’ a monetary-institutional form, whereas the physical conception of capital leaves command looking like benign contribution.

The middle chapters on interest and liquidity are the technical core. They are also, in my opinion, the book’s most important contribution to monetary theory. The orthodox view treats interest as the price of saving, or more grandly, the price of time. Mason and Jayadev’s answer is that the observed interest rate is never an exchange rate between stuff now and stuff later. It’s a price of money in terms of money or, more accurately, a relationship between money commitments (117–19). The familiar notion of the ‘real interest rate’ works only in a one-commodity corn economy. Extending Sraffa’s received wisdom, once there are multiple goods, changing relative prices, heterogeneous borrowers, capital assets, and secondary markets, the putative real rate fractures into an indefinite plurality of own rates and asset yields (121–26).

Their positive account is most certainly Keynesian, but of a specific sort: the Keynes of uncertainty, liquidity, convention, and asset prices. Liquidity is not a property of one asset in isolation. It’s a property of whole balance sheets and the institutional networks in which they are embedded. In actual markets, interest rates are determined less by the market for new loans than by the market for existing credit assets. The rate is a stock equilibrium, not a flow equilibrium: ‘the price that leaves bond owners willing to hold the debt already in existence’ (167). This is why an on-the-run Treasury commands a premium over an off-the-run Treasury: it’s more saleable, shiftable, liquid (169–70). Thus, interest is not paid because the future as such is priced. It is paid because the future cannot be known or contracted over. Finance, therefore, manufactures claims on what may come and prices their present shiftability.

Chapter 6, ‘The Fetish of the Real’, extends this critique to GDP and national accounting. As is well-known, GDP is a sum of money payments, produced through changing conventions of national accounting, yet treated as if it were a quantity of stuff. However, there is no natural way to aggregate bricks, hours, medical care, software, rents, weapons, childcare, light bulbs, etc. except through money prices (203–5). Deflating nominal GDP does not magically convert money into matter. It produces a constructed money metric quantity. While this is useful in some contexts, it’s increasingly arbitrary across long distances of time, space, and social structure. What is more, many uses of ‘real GDP’ are ‘anti-knowledge’ because they erase rather than aggregate the underlying information (208). Money is thus not a veil because it hides the real quantities beneath it. It is ‘a veil that we put on ourselves’ (265).

The closing chapter directly asks what follows politically from the more conceptual analysis up to that point. Interestingly, Mason and Jayadev refuse the dystopian thesis that capitalism is commodifying everything. A world in which everything was for sale would be one in which nothing could function as money, because the institutions of monetary recordkeeping, contract enforcement, and property would themselves be up for auction (271–72). There are vast swathes of social life which have already escaped or never fully entered the rule of money in the first place: public education, science, open-source software, Wikipedia, the park, the family, the university, the internal planning of firms (272–74). Money can’t be understood as a mere parasite on these domains, because it is also a catalyst, a solvent, a means by which older forms of coordination are broken apart and recombined at greater scale (274–76). This leads to a soft, subtle landing in the closing pages: a poetic exhortation to ‘push the curtain aside’ and ‘walk out into the sunshine’ (288).

This is a beautiful image to end on, but it also reveals some issues that deserve attention. The first concerns the book’s governing distinction between money-world and the social-material world outside it. Of course, analytically, the distinction does carry value. Without it, the critique of real GDP, real interest, capital stock, and debt morality would stall. But, at times, the two-world language risks making the non-monetary world sound more available than it might actually be. Once the veil is removed, are we meant to encounter a social and material reality whose own forms of measurement, obligation, and coordination are waiting there intact? Any project of reclamation must reckon with the fact that non-monetary measures are not outside institutionality. Hours, tons, emissions, housing units, life expectancy, square footage, calories, and care time are forms of social abstraction as well. Thus, the alternative to money’s rule is not recovering the concrete. It has to be something more integrally constructive all the way down: the construction of other infrastructures of measurement, obligation, planning, and revision, and so on.

Second concerns the very concept of time itself. The chapters on interest are sharp precisely because they contest the fantasy that interest is the price of the future. And, yet, the book could have pushed this further. If ‘the future does not exist’ and ‘exchange is possible only in the present’ (170), then the interest rate is not a temporal price at all – at least, not in the extensionally quantitative sense. It is a settlement relation, a premium attached to flexibility, duration, hierarchy, and enforceability within a structure of monetary commitments. That is, finance does not price time – it formats temporality and the condition by which time is understood as such, in the first instance. It produces enforceable ‘presents’ in which some actors can defer, roll over, refinance, revalue, and wait, while others must settle now. Thus, time is not a hidden substance behind interest but one of the (many) things money-world (re)organizes.

A final point concerns plurality and hierarchy. The authors acknowledge that the book largely leaves aside the fact that the world contains ‘many moneys’, as well as the dynamics of foreign exchange, global financial hierarchy, and development (18). But for readers of Finance and Society this is worth noting. If money-world is constituted by settlement systems, balance-sheet commitments, and hierarchies of liquidity, then the relation among ‘moneys’ is not an add-on. The dollar system, swap lines, offshore money markets, sovereign spreads, and development constraints are where the ‘rule of money’ appears as a hierarchy of temporal and political capacities.

All that said, these are friendly pushbacks. They only emerge because of the book’s keen provocations. Its achievement is to reopen a path that much economics, mainstream and heterodox alike, has allowed to become overgrown. It refuses both the orthodox comfort that money is neutral and the critical comfort that money can be denounced while its categories are still used as if they transparently disclosed ‘the real’. In that sense, Against Money is not simply ‘against money’. It is against the metaphysics that money seduces us to inhabit and wield. And in the end, what Mason and Jayadev give us is something preliminary and useful: an instruction in how not to be bewitched.