What is it about money that is so seductive to so many? It can hardly be the cash thing. No matter how colorful or well designed, the piece of paper (or, increasingly, high-tech plastic) itself can only provide so much utility on its own; and even less the bits and bytes of digital versions. No, the attraction is not to the thing itself, but to its abstraction, an abstraction of an abstraction built upon faith and trust in a particular social construction. The euro, like all currencies, is a contrivance at the base of a political-economic house of cards. Still, I figure, things would have to be quite unbelievably grim for that house of cards to fall in my lifetime, so hitching my dreams of the future onto this contrivance seems a pretty low risk. And, as long as we all think that, the fiction remains a social fact.

In Volume 1 of Capital, Marx presents money as a particular form of commodity, having evolved from the simple commodity form to its highest abstraction (which also implies an amplified level of alienation). Definitional to the commodity form is that the object hides the human relations it embodies, with all of the sweat and toil of labor becoming mystified: in this way, money is “the direct incarnation of all human labor,” Marx states.^{Footnote 1} But, unlike other commodities, it can appear to reproduce itself, from the M-C-M’ cycle to the even more sterile and opaque (and magical) M-M’ movement. In this way, money is “the alienated capacity of mankind.”^{Footnote 2}

Marx observed that money unbounds self-interested accumulation from the realm of the rational (at least as understood in terms of material use-value). There are only so many coats a person can wear, only so many cows she can eat; but with money, the sky is the limit. Its utility is unbound by specificity; the potential it holds is endless. M’ cannot be contained.

In The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed, Martijn Konings reframes Marx’s observations about money, calling on semiotics as well as political economy to make his case. Konings provides a thoughtful intellectual history to justify his framework, and he arrives at several refreshingly counterintuitive conclusions.

This book is composed of two extended essays. The first (encompassing Chapters 1-4), makes an argument for understanding money as icon, and offers a critique of conventional social wisdom about the alienating qualities of money. The second part (Chapters 5-8) looks at the US political economy in an attempt to understand the rise of neoliberalism, which Konings sees as confounding most progressive thinkers.

Conventional social science wisdom on markets and societies is largely Polanyian, with markets seen as eroding the relations of Gemeinschaft as well as Gesellschaft. In fact, Konings argues, economy and society operate through their imbrication: “morality, faith, power, and emotion, the distinctive qualities of human association are interiorized into the logic of the economy” and yet this is not just reducing the social to “the utilitarian logic of the cash nexus” [2].

The Marxist and Weberian traditions are the basis for the disembedding narrative epitomized in Polanyi’s influential 1944 work on “The Great Transformation.” From this perspective (“idolatry critique,” in Konings’ words), money is seen as a fetish, a constructed idol that denies its constructed character. Marx provided the basis for the Polyanian view of money as eroding social bonds. In The 1844 Manuscripts, he writes that money “appears as an inverting power in relation to the individual and to those social and other bonds which claim to be essences in themselves. It transforms loyalty into treason, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, nonsense into reason, and reason into nonsense.”^{Footnote 3}

Konings makes a compelling argument that markets are productive in social, cultural, and political as well as economic realms, and that both Marxist and neoclassical economists miss the full richness of these intertwined processes. Money and markets produce connectivity as well as alienation^{Footnote 4}—a fundamental paradox that is too often forgotten.

Building an understanding of money from the pragmatic semiotics of Charles Peirce’s theory, Konings sees money primarily as an icon. He argues that money is iconic because it is something “hard to define but that we intuitively grasp” [20]. An icon “enjoys universal and immediate recognition yet its meaning has deep personal resonance, is capable of addressing the particularities and messy mediations of our own lives” [27]. Money is iconic because we see it as an independent source of power [61]. It means something itself, but it also metonymically signifies the larger system of finance and capitalism. As it is indexed today, money takes on an almost sacred, religious aura.

Following Weber, Konings argues that the secular thrust of Western capitalism was not a negation of the sacred, but a “metamorphosis of the scared,” with money being the apotheosis. Konings uses the semiotics of money as the key recurring example, and he does a compelling job of reinterpreting Marx’s festishisms with the idea of an emotional logic of capitalism. Still, he does not rigorously buttress some of his key arguments; for example, in defining money’s appeal, more than once he falls back on the assertion that “we” just intuitively “get it” (the “it” being money’s meaning).

With a nod to Latour, Konings argues that money in its quintessential form is “a sui generis fact and a relation that has to be translated,” at once a particular and an abstraction. Money is the key icon of modern capitalism: it is built on a complex system of commitments but we see it as an independent source of social control.

(In an extended sideline argument, Konings draws heavily on Agamben, Foucault, and Deleuze. Agamben is right when he says that Foucault never connects his two main strands of analysis: on the one hand, the often institutionalized (or at least socially recognized) apparatuses and techniques of power (the Panopticon, etc.), and on the other hand, the technologies of the self and discipline. Agamben’s description of the bare life brings these strands together, as does Deleuze’s look at control and indebtedness. And Konings provides a useful synthesis.)

Money helps us satisfy needs, but is also a means of participating in community, especially, Konings argues, modern American community. In the second half of the book, he looks at the history of the US left (progressivism) and economic policy, and offers a critique of what the Germans call the Anglo-American variety of capitalism. Konings does a great job of tracing the genealogies of power and ideas, and in showing how the democratization of credit was key to progressive ideas of inclusion (even if its current manifestation is seen in payday loans and the over-financing of the mortgage crisis).

Unfortunately, much of his cultural “data” on US views come from anecdotes from Oprah, Dr. Phil, and various self-help gurus. He states that “one of neoliberal America’s key cultural institutions, the ‘Oprah Winfrey Show’” promotes the idea that “the possession of money is merely a function of spiritual worth” [111]. He gives a few examples, but surely even simple-minded Middle Americans’ views are more complicated.

Konings is most compelling, and on more solid ground, when he tackles the big question: why many Americans support neoliberal reforms when they are often directly contrary to their own self-interest. He argues that the neoliberal promise is one of redemption and hopeful aspiration, while progressives try to repudiate money. Neoliberals talk the language of money: of possibility and aspiration. Progressives, Konings writes, reject the language of money and try to distance themselves from it in a way that seems disconnected from most ordinary Americans’ lives.

As a result, neoliberal arguments hold a “moral appeal and emotional resonance” that progressives cannot match [108]. Konings argues that the popular appeal of the neoliberal perspective is that it offers redemption. And progressive scolds cannot wrap their minds around the emotional (and ethical!) appeal of neoliberal hope and optimism.

Konings’ message is an important one for social theory—more so than for political action. He shows that sociologists and anthropologists have historically tended to focus on the corrosive effects of money and markets on traditional lifeways and the ways in which global markets disadvantage marginalized peoples. This perspective can make engagement with economists, policy makers, and the general public difficult because they tend to see money and markets as primary routes to achieving the good life.

As Konings argues, social scientists need to embrace the complexity and paradoxes of real economic life: that money and market interactions can strengthen and promote social relations as well as erode them. At the same time, economists and policy makers often have difficulty allowing that money and markets are embedded in particular social and political power structures and that “free” market transactions are less free than they might think. We would all do well to follow Konings’ lead in staking out a middle ground at once politically pragmatic and yet sensitive to the emotional enchantment associated with money and markets.