One is mistaken to think that corporations dominate the electoral process in the United States is misplaced. The problem is actually deeper: money structures the field of ideas and sets the terms of the debate.
With taxpayer suffrage abolished and universal suffrage achieved, political participation in our democratic societies should no longer be conditioned on property ownership. However, as Timothy Kuhner shows, politics remain subservient to capital.
Is it really the case, as is often alleged, that money decides everything about elections? As the US presidential election is looming, La Vie des idées/Books & Ideas and Public Books team up to examine the influence of money in today’s electoral democracies.
In France as in the United States, transparency has become a core democratic requirement, and is the cornerstone of all the laws that claim to regulate the funding of political life. But this art of disclosing information often coexists with the ability to conceal it.
In a stimulating essay, Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz denounce the ‘sciences of happiness’. In the service of neoliberal ideology, it encourages us to abandon any idea of political change and induces guilt in the ‘psytizens’ who are unable to follow its directives.
How do commodities and monies circulate in prison where trade, whether monetary or not, is forbidden? Drawing from a collective ethnographic research, this essay discusses the social mechanisms that lead to the ranking of people and objects that money objec-tivizes, thus casting light on the social dynamics at play in the carceral system.
How to assess a value to things when money is lacking? Historian Laurent Feller shows that during the Middle Ages, commercial exhanges were structured by the social value of the persons they involved and the relationships of clientele or dependency they created. Thus valuing practices were necessarily informed by the social contexts in which they occurred.
In pre-industrial Europe, in which the economy of specificity and the habit of exchanging gifts prevailed, putting the buying process under the scrutiny of the community, through auctions or the market place, was an essential step in reducing the inherent uncertainty of fixing prices through face to face encounters.
The first part of this special issue on Money & Value, published as a series on Books&Ideas, offers several perspectives on the genesis of Viviana A. Zelizer’s groundbreaking book, The Social Meaning of Money, the reactions it provoked, and its enduring influence on both sides of the Atlantic.
