The Currency of Politics w/ Stefan Eich

This series features Stefan Eich, assistant professor of government at Georgetown University, and covers his book The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes.

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Episode 1

Discusses the history of money, the relationship between war and currency, and much more through the time of John Locke.

Episode 2

Focuses on the oft-overlooked work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, state experimentation with fiat currencies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, parallels with modern crypto currencies, and MMT.

Episode 3

Focuses on the work of the King of All Socialists himself, Karl Marx. The crew touches on his political economic approach to currency, distills an explanation of “capital” into a 20-minute sequence, explores how the 1857 Panic affected his work, and more.

Episode 4

After touching on the gold standard as it existed in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as the paper money/specie relationship at the time, the crew gets into the work of John Maynard Keynes. They talk about his response to the Treaty of Versailles, his time at the UK’s India Office, his focus on central banks, the Second Thirty Years War, and more.

Episode 5

Continues the discussion of John Maynard Keynes, his reaction to the the Great Depression, his seminal 1936 work The General Theory Of Employment Interest And Money, his personal politics, and more.

Episode 6

Focuses on Keynes in the era of WWII, how the war affected the implementation of his ideas, the emerging divisions during the hegemonic transition of the UK to the US, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, Keynes’s vision for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and more.

Episode 7

Picks up in the 1970s, discussing the end of the Bretton Woods system, petrodollars and eurodollars, democracy’s relation to finance, the collapse of the Soviet Union’s effect on currency politics, the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, and more.