UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation is concerned to rethink the relation between money and the state in a way that challenges both Marxist and chartalist stories about the history and nature of money and monetary phenomena. In doing so, it examines the problem of liquidity, or the question of whether or not there exists a market in money, as a problem of constitutional order and class struggle, and argues that this problem can be illuminated by means of a study of tragic drama. It traces a genealogy of “modern money” created through the monetization of public liabilities through the first emergence of a permanent peacetime deficit state in early modern England, and asks what we might learn about this genealogy through an attention to the works of William Shakespeare as a sensitive observer of the social and political fault lines out of which the system of modern money emerged. In doing so, it follows his historical gaze backwards through history, to medieval England and the earliest coinage societies of Mediterranean antiquity. Out of this discussion is generated a new theory of money that challenges all currently existing orthodox and heterodox theories, and which sees money as constituted not by an identity or equivalence but rather by a difference or a spread, in terms of which options can be created and priced.