Book Reviews

Two Cents’ Worth

Nigel Dodd

The Social Life of Money

Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2014, 456 pp., $35.00 (cloth).

What is money? That is what Nigel Dodd, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, leads us to explore in The Social Life of Money. Along the way we are presented ideas on money from the greats in literature, philosophy, sociology, and many other disciplines. This book is more modern art than science. It takes us out of our comfort zone—especially those of us schooled in economics—and unsettles us, and the question is, deliberately, unresolved.Â

The author leads us from insights into one aspect of money from people not typically considered monetary theorists, including Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Keith Hart, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ferdinand de Saussure, to other, somewhat contradictory but equally insightful, notions. As you are trying to make sense of it all—and this is not a light read—Dodd proposes that these ideas all have something to offer. Money is too protean to be captured by a single idea.Â

Dodd does not offer a new perspective; he seeks to enlighten us with many. In that sense, his message is already a sacrilege: the myth that money is driven by cast-iron laws understood by hard-nosed practitioners is shattered. Instead, the author offers a reminder that money in general, and particularly government-issued paper money, is a social construct. We do not question the $100 printed on a bit of cotton and linen that costs 12.5 cents to produce because we trust the U.S. government will honor its liabilities, given its ability to tax its citizens and resources and its attendant military might. Even where there are plentiful resources and resourceful people, absent faith in a society, the value of money collapses—as in Venezuela today, Argentina and Brazil in 1990, and the Weimar Republic in 1923.Â

To say that money is a claim on society is not original, Dodd reminds us with references to Georg Simmel and others. But he is...