Abstract This paper develops legal and geopolitical ramifications of Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care, my forthcoming book on neochartalist political economy and critical theory. In the paper’s first section, I rehearse the book’s critique of critical theory’s tacit Liberal treatment of modern money and aesthetics. Here, I attune aesthetic theory to the neocharalist understanding of money as a boundless public utility, while uncovering the impoverished social topology upon which critical theory and Liberal modernity writ large have implicitly relied. In the second section, I extend this topological turn to questions of jurisprudence and geopolitics. There, I argue that money is law and that, as law, money traces a necessary shape. At the same time, I problematize the modern language of sovereignty upon which neochartalists typically rely. My contention is not that the modern-nation state is somehow dead or passé but, rather, that the modern metaphysics of sovereignty obscures money’s underlying legal architecture and capacities and, ultimately, naturalizes a politics of irresponsibility that neochartalism otherwise repudiates.
Keywords: money, neochartalism, Modern Monetary Theory, law, sovereignty, geopolitics, Thomas Aquinas, Middle Ages, early modern Europe, critical theory, aesthetic theory.
JEL codes: A1, B0, B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, E0, F0, F3, F6, K0, H0
