Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism

Bjerg O. (2014) Making Money: The Philosophy of Crisis Capitalism, London; Brooklyn, NY: Verso.

Abstract

In his book, Ole Bjerg presents a philosophy of money in modern capitalism. Issues related to financial relationships are considered with help of the ideas of Slavoy Žižek, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Marie Émile Lacan. The author considers the existing theories of money, deliberates current economic theories, and reconstructs a process of how banks make money in order to demonstrate the main principles of the functioning of the financial system in contemporary society. He highlights that the question of the nature of money and the question of making money are both political. This book will be interesting not only for economists but also for a wider group of readers.

We here publish his “Introduction: Seinsvergessenheit and Money” and the first chapter, “Analyzing Financial Markets.” In the introduction, the author addresses Heidegger’s idea to put the issue of money at the forefront of philosophical research, thus establishing the book’s main idea. Here, he also describes the book’s structure, which is concentrated on the phrase “how to make money.” In the first chapter, Bjerg, with the help of basic ideas of Žižek’s philosophy, creates a view of financial markets and further depicts two schools of speculation on financial markets, technical and fundamental analyses, pointing to their philosophical features.