Impersonal Power

Gerstenberger, Heide; Fernbach, David

doi:10.1163/ej.9789004130272.i-803

Cited by 28 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This political content did not vanish, but was rather concentrated in the form of a centralized state -'a separate entity, beside and outside civil society' -equipped with a monopoly on violence (Marx and Engels, 1947: 59). This unified state gradually ceased to function as the monarch's property and instead assumed the form of a liberal public institution (Gerstenberger, 2007).…”

Section: Politics Economy Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Monetary sovereignty and the ‘Invisible Leviathan’: the politics of Marx’s theory of money

Copley

2024

Global Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A debate has recently emerged in Heterodox Economics and Political Economy on the nature of monetary sovereignty, and whether it can be democratised and wielded to address the social and environmental catastrophes of our age. While Modern Monetary Theory understands monetary sovereignty to be relatively unconstrained, post-Keynesian, Structuralist and Critical Macro-Finance approaches point to various external limits on states’ abilities to govern money – from the international currency hierarchy to the offshore nature of money creation. This article evaluates this debate in light of Marx’s monetary theory. Under capitalism, money constitutes the social adhesive of a world of privatised production and mass dispossession, which conjures an anonymous, competitive logic that Marx terms the ‘law of value’. To function in this way, money must be underpinned by an historically novel form of state sovereignty. The state must both back money with its coercive powers and insulate monetary governance from popular forces, or else risk losing the confidence of the profit-driven private actors upon which money relies. Yet in exercising its sovereign capacity to govern domestic and international money relations, the state inadvertently reproduces the law of value on a global scale – an ‘Invisible Leviathan’ that subordinates states to its dictates. Contra the Heterodox literature, then, monetary sovereignty is not a vehicle for radical democracy or social/environmental justice, nor is it simply constrained by external limits. Instead, monetary sovereignty is innately a practice of depoliticisation that unwittingly produces a global logic of economic domination that binds states’ hands.

show abstract

Section: Politics Economy Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Monetary sovereignty and the ‘Invisible Leviathan’: the politics of Marx’s theory of money

Copley

2024

Global Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Heide Gerstenberger (2007), Impersonal Power. Leiden: Brill, 632-662.22 PierreVidal-Naquet (1986), The Black Hunter.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The World of Dune as an Alternate Future Without AI

Krašovec

2024

Film and Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…In this broad tradition, Heide Gerstenberger (2006) sets out the historical emergence of the bourgeois state and the evolution of the power relationship from personal power, vested in a person with a status of power, to impersonal power, vested in the state and its institutions. Rejecting a simplistic structural functionalism and materialism, she identifies the specific historical conditions and drivers that underpinned this development in which appropriation by force is replaced by appropriation through market and contract.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Book Review: Materialistische Staatskritik by Moritz Zeiler

Hinze

2020

Capital & Class

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Impersonal Power

Cited by 28 publications

References 0 publications

Monetary sovereignty and the ‘Invisible Leviathan’: the politics of Marx’s theory of money

Monetary sovereignty and the ‘Invisible Leviathan’: the politics of Marx’s theory of money

The World of Dune as an Alternate Future Without AI

Book Review: Materialistische Staatskritik by Moritz Zeiler

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About