Eich’s book is a tour de force. It takes us through six episodes in which the history of political theory and the history of political economy intersect through the topic of money. From Aristotle to Locke and Fichte and then through to Marx and Keynes before a final episode costarring Hayek, Rawls, Habermas, and Walzer, we are treated to a fascinating set of reflections on what money is and should be, each articulated in the face of a particular historical crisis. This approach gives us a new way of thinking about what is salient in the history of political thought, but it also helps us think about the present. Eich hopes to move us beyond narrow debates over the depoliticization of money by insisting that money is always already political even when it announces itself as antipolitical, so that the real question is which conception of political life—which values but also which underlying social theory—we want to be embedded in monetary institutions. In explicitly tethering his patient, detailed historical scholarship to the broader goal of stimulating and invigorating reflection on one of the central issues of our own day, Eich tries to overcome the divide between historical work and contemporary debate.

There is much to praise in Freedom from Fear, including Kahan’s compelling case that liberalism must be studied in relation to the concrete conditions which shaped liberal fears and hopes; his fair-minded exploration of liberalism’s complex relationships with democracy, religion, imperialism, feminism, and economic transformation; and his recovery of important, oft-neglected figures. But, as Kahan reminds us, liberalism valorizes conflict. Accordingly, I dwell on my disagreement or doubts concerning Kahan’s definition of liberalism, his depiction of liberalism’s “third wave,” and his suggestions for liberalism’s response to populism.

There’s a tension at the heart of Justice for Animals.1 Some humans, says Nussbaum, can realize important capabilities only through consuming certain animal products—through not adopting a vegan diet. Consequently, the entitlements of some humans conflict with the entitlements that the capabilities approach grants to the animals these humans (would) eat. After all, animal agriculture almost invariably involves killing animals, violating animals’ bodily integrity, controlling animals’ life prospects and affiliations, and limiting animals’ ability to sense, reason, and play. Is this tragic conflict resolvable? Or must we accept that one group—certain humans or certain animals—lose out?

Why has contemporary political theory been silent on money? The answer Stefan Eich provides in his brilliant book The Currency of Politics begins with John Rawls. Rawls’s silence on money and monetary policy is, for Eich, mostly a result of indifference—an indifference that reflected the fact that Rawls took for granted a “confident postwar context” characterized by affluence and a relatively stable international monetary system (181). The real “silent revolution,” as Eich calls it (20, 177), comes after Rawls. By the 1980s, the international monetary regime undergoes drastic changes, including the lifting of capital controls and the rise of central bank independence. As Eich insightfully argues, this depoliticization of money was itself a political strategy. By letting consequential economic decisions remain outside the realm of political contestation, states tried to avoid excessive pressures. According to Eich, major political theorists, including Jürgen Habermas and Michael Walzer, fell prey to this neoliberal logic. In part because of the inflationary demands that a democratization of the economy would imply, such thinkers grew skeptical of the possibility of any such democratization. The disappearance of money from political theory was one of the consequences of this more general turning away from economic democracy (197–99).

The Currency of Politics should: change the way political theorists understand their texts and contexts; lead to the reworking of their concepts and events; and ultimately alter the very subject matter that constitutes their field. For too long the subfield of political theory, along with the whole discipline of political science, has been complicit in the bankrupt project of neoclassical economics. I call modern economics bankrupt because its founding assumptions and fundamental models have repeatedly been proved false, untenable, and unproductive for our understanding of the economic forces and relations that partially constitute the capitalist social orders in which we live. I call political science (and acutely, political theory) complicit because in hiving off economic questions—or worse, “the economy”— and leaving those issues to economists we have reified the very dichotomy between politics and economics that capitalism itself instantiates and exacerbates.1

In the summer of 2023, approximately 2,000 young, dead penguins washed up on the beaches across Uruguay. The birds were thin, their stomachs empty, and scientists suggest that this mass death was due to starvation. Without fat, the penguins can’t keep warm in the colder waters that they now have to navigate to find food. Food shortages due to overfishing in South America may have contributed to their demise. This die-off was unprecedented for the species, although the magellanic penguin population has been consistently dropping, and the species is now considered near threatened. Impacts of climate change, which contributed to these penguins’ precarity, were also likely the cause of the mass deaths of penguins in New Zealand in 2022, when hundreds of little blue penguins washed up dead. They probably died because warming oceans forced them to venture into deeper and colder waters in search of food, causing them to dive to distances that are not sustainable. These birds were also found to be thinner than they should have been. An even more drastic penguin die-off occurred in Antarctica in 2022—over 10,000 emperor penguin chicks perished when the sea-ice they were growing up on melted before they had the fat and waterproofed feathers needed to survive in the cold waters. Most of the birds drowned or froze to death. These sorts of large-scale group deaths have led scientists to suggest that the emperor penguins will be extinct by the end of the century.

According to Eich, “the history of political thinking about money” accumulates in “layers of crisis,” since crises provoke “an openness to new ideas” that interrupts the calm reproduction of meaning (xiii–xiv). Couldn’t we apply this insight to the history of critical democratic theory? Running through and beneath its explicit excavation of the political thought attending and provoked by monetary crises of the past, Eich’s book also turns up traces of what we could call a crisis of democracy and a crisis of critique. I attend to these traces to ask what we might learn from Eich’s book about the limits and internal tensions of critical theory.

The two first reflections on the politics of money you will see in Eich’s book, a substantial intervention (indeed, the notes are fully one-third the length of the main text itself), come from the visual arts and poetry. Commented upon at the end of his book, the cover image comes from Otis Kaye’s simultaneously playful and biting memento of the Met’s 1961 purchase of Rembrandt’s shimmering 1653 painting, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. At some 2.3 million dollars, it was the most expensive museum purchase of all time. And Kaye (who seems to have lost most of his own savings in the great crash of 1929) offers both an homage, recreating the main figure of Aristotle with his hand on the bust of a representation of Homer, and a mordant reflection. The trompe l’oeil qualities of paper money in the painting hark back to earlier inflationary economics with the French revolutionary assignats, whose history found renewed interest among those trying to account for German hyperinflation and the Great Depression. Similarly, around Kaye’s edges, the dark intensity of Rembrandt’s background peels away to reveal utilitarian paneling, into which are fixed and interlaced wodges of cash, alongside other symbols of money making. The Heart of the Matter is more than just a wry reflection on the imbrication of art and commerce, or of Rembrandt interpretation—fleeting worldly fame, or lasting reputation. For while its truth seems superficially obvious—that the art world and the art market are inseparable—it is not entirely clear what sort of lesson we are supposed to learn about money. It is on the surface and under it, the base and the superstructure, form and content, style as well as substance. Is it telling us that a society where money is king is one that cannot see the truth of things, or that money, or at least the having of it, is what allows us not to think about it too much?

Over the past few decades, the “turn to empire” in political theory has powerfully illuminated how legacies of imperialism and colonialism have profoundly shaped the conceptual history of core categories in modern political thought such as democracy, citizenship, freedom, equality, and the social contract. Early on, scholars in this vein of research focused their attention on tracing these dynamics among mostly canonical political thinkers. As the turn to empire has matured, however, a newer generation of studies is fixing its focus more significantly on the contemporary legacies of colonialism and empire in the present and alternative trajectories of political thought mounted by anticolonial activists and intellectuals in the periphery. Picking up on this tendency, the four books under review speak to each other in intriguing ways in both their differences and similarities. Thematically, all four books often share a common set of conceptual concerns despite speaking across an array of imperial and colonial contexts. Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire and Nazmul Sultan’s Waiting for the People are both interested in the entwinement of empire and popular sovereignty, yet in the different colonial contexts of the white settler colonies of the British Empire (in Valdez’s case) and British India (in Sultan’s case). Both Sultan and Sam Klug, who in The Internal Colony is writing about the post-World War II context of racial politics in the United States, are concerned with how anticolonial actors and thinkers enlisted developmental idioms and languages in their struggles against imperial rule and racialized exploitation. And both Valdez and David Scott’s Irreparable Evil grapple with the contemporary prospects of emancipation from and reparation of the harms engendered by the history of imperialism and colonial slavery.

At least since Aristotle defined human beings as “political animals,” politics in the Western tradition has largely been defined in anthropocentric terms. Politics was a realm of distinctively human endeavors, while nonhuman nature remained outside. Nature might impinge on or set limits to political action, but was conceived as constitutively outside of politics. However else nonhuman entities might engage with humans or each other, these relations or engagements were not understood as political. Until quite recently, Western political theory was decidedly anthropocentric. The rise of environmental problematics, and particularly the political salience of the global climate crisis, however, have made the idea of a constitutive separation between (nonhuman) nature and (human) politics less tenable. Not only the material manipulation of the nonhuman world, but also its conceptual framing, are increasingly understood as political projects.1 At the same time, Western political thought has become increasingly open to non-Western cosmologies that do not posit a rigid divide between human and non- (or more-than-) human worlds. Environmental (or green) political theory has become an increasingly robust subdiscipline,2 and political theory, like a number of other humanities disciplines, has undergone an “animal turn.”3 Three of the four recent books under consideration form part of this latter animal turn while Sharon Krause’s Eco-Emancipation is firmly situated in the field of environmental political theory.