Introduction: One Conflation, Two Separations

Classical liberalism - our shared ideological endowment as received, elaborated, and bequeathed by the thinkers of the eighteneenth and nineteenth centuries - seems to have left many Europeans and most Americans afflicted with two forms of self-estrangement. Both forms are mutually supportive, and both forms proceed from a shared primal error. Both forms additionally are "tragic," in that both are entirely needless.

The first self-estrangement is alienation from our own most inclusive modality of collectively deliberating, planning, and acting together in pursuit of shared ends - that is, from our political selves, and from the polity that those selves all constitute. This is so even in respect of that shared end which is the optimal public facilitation of each private person's individual ends. Each 'I' is, as it were, separated from our common political 'we' - our res publica, or "public thing." Our republic.

The second self-estrangement is that from our own most inclusive modality of coordinating our materially productive and distributive wealth-generating activities - that is, from our producing and our goods- and services-exchanging selves, as well as from the media of productive investment and exchange, the "money," to which our productive and distributive relations give rise.1 Each 'I' is, as it were, separated from our monetary and therefore our productive and distributive 'we' as operative in our shared "exchange economy" or "commercial society" - the "common currency" used in our "common weal."2 Our commonwealth.

A familiar idiomatic manifestation of the first separation is the ubiquitous, as it were negatively fetishizing reference to "the state" or, more often in modern American parlance, "the government" that one hears with dispiriting frequency.3 In such locutions, we hear strange intimations that our own mode of acting together is something set over and irretrievably apart from, or exogenously imposed upon, or even actively hostile to, ourselves and our fellow citizens - that is, again, from, upon, and to the very people who constitute this polity and authorize its instrumentalities to act in their name.

A familiar idiomatic manifestation of the second separation is the ubiquitous reference to our economy, our money, and our wealth as things that, like "the state" or "the government," "come from without" and are exogenously given. Money figures as something that "doesn't grow on trees," must be "backed up" by gold or some other scarce alien substance, and is "debased" by "the government" itself when the latter resorts to the "mere printing" of "mere fiat money." "The economy," for its part, is taken to be extra-political, even extracivilizational, not unlike weather, hence something to which persons - including "the government" - must simply conform themselves stoically, rather than trying to shape or design.

In the latter instance, of course, alienation from "the government," from "money," and from "the economy" - hence from our political and our productive and goods/services-exchanging selves altogether - combine into one all-encompassing self-separation. It's a bit like "a complex," in the old Freudian sense of that word: a single great tangle of far-reaching, unquestioned, and ultimately unstable premises that together leave all in a world - a social world, no less - far beyond our own powers of understanding, construction, and control.

Notwithstanding that, it is we who've constructed it.

And we in "the West," and in America in particular, have been thinking like this, and living accordingly, for decades, if not longer.4

Under such circumstances it is tempting to ask, why the definite article? Why "the" government, money, and economy? Why not "our" government, money, and economy?

I referred to these "definite article" forms of estrangement as "needless," hence "tragic," as well as "mutually reinforcing" and rooted in one common error. And I've just now suggested they travel together. I want in the critical meditation that constitutes the first three chapters of this book to show how these estrangements bind with each other, then to show why they are tragically needless, by tracing them both to their shared primal error.

In a sense, they're two sides of one coin, pun hereby ratified, if not quite intended.

If I succeed in carrying out this intention, it will be easy to see once I'm done that our polity, our economy, our money, productive capital and finance, far from needing "democratization," are at bottom already quite deeply democratic. What remains is for the demos itself both to see and to "own" this, that we might then put our state and our money - our capital - to much better, indeed more productive, more just, and more democratic, use. That we shall do in the reconstruction that constitutes the final two chapters of this book.

Here then is how I'll proceed. I'll begin with "the state" and "the government" and our political selves, if for no other reason than that what needs drawing out here is already reasonably close to the surface of intuition.

I'll then turn to "money," "finance," "economy," and our materially productive/distributive selves, the structures of which are much easier to recognize once we're clear about the structure of our political selves - that is, about what we collectively are and what living, acting, and producing together as one demos or polity entail. In effect, I'll work a conceptual reconstruction of the fundamental economic categories whose names we hear every day, bringing them into more perspicuous and truth-manifesting correspondence with the political and legal categories that structure our expectations around public governance.

I'll then be positioned to elaborate what I take to be the most noteworthy implications that these reflections yield where the conduct of finance and the reclaiming of public capital in a producers' republic are concerned. These will find readily "operationalized" form as an institutional reconstruction corresponding to the preceding conceptual reconstruction before we are finished. In that sense, this book will prove both analytically clarifying and practically galvanizing. In effect, it sketches a fully practicable "utopia" in the course of revealing just why this utopia must be made real.

Notes

1. 1. The suggestion that money is something to which our productive and distributive relations give rise, or that even in some sense they constitute, might ring obscure at the moment. Its truth, I believe, will grow obvious as we proceed. So will the reason for frequently speaking here of "productive and distributive" relations jointly rather than "productive" relations and "distributive" relations severally. Here is a foretaste: It takes material resources to make (more) material resources, and in a "decentralized exchange economy" or "commercial society" such as our own this means we must distribute resources (over persons or other productive agents) in particular ways in order to produce resources. As chapter 2 of the present work will draw out, money is that means.
2. 2. As with the suggestion, just now, that money is constituted by productive and distributive relations, so with the suggestion that our monetary 'we' is our productive and distributive 'we' - what now rings obscure will appear more perspicuously once we are through.
3. 3. "Negatively fetishizing" - that is, treating as somehow "external" and "radically other," while at the same time dreading and fearing. Dreading and fearing it as a menacing "other." Our own shared creation - indeed our own shared identity as 'we' made of 'I's - viewed now as monstrously alien.
4. 4. One or another form of liberal thought seems to have been part of the complex of American political and economic thinking since the get-go, inasmuch as "the founders" made significant use of both Locke and Smith, among others (the latter's most oft-cited treatise even having been published in 1776). But the early modern "republican revival" seems to have been even more influential in the early days of the American polity, having waned in its sway nearly to the vanishing point only some time in the early to mid-twentieth century. Cf. Robert Hockett, A Republic of Producers (forthcoming, Yale University Press); Robert Hockett, "A Jeffersonian Republic by Hamiltonian Means," University of Southern California Law Review 79(1) (2005): 45; Robert Hockett, Whose Ownership? Which Society?, Cardozo Law Review...