This article traces the conceptual history of key terms used to describe and criticize bad political regimes, focusing on the displacement of “tyranny” by “dictatorship” and “authoritarianism.” Classical Greek thought understood tyranny primarily in terms of the character of rulers, whereas the modern idea of dictatorship emerged from a Roman conceptual framework that focused on authority and its legitimation. New problems of legitimation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries diminished the utility of the character-centric concept of tyranny and increased the fruitfulness of dictatorship for political analysis. The emergence of the modern state in the nineteenth century shaped the conceptual field by increasing the salience of problems concerning the appropriation or usurpation of sovereignty, the distortion of popular legitimation and accountability, and the incentives for submission to illegitimate orders. I conclude that the use of “authoritarianism” is likely to increase in prominence, but that retaining multiple regime concepts enriches analysis.

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?

Although it is largely overlooked, Thomas Hobbes spent the final years of his life translating Homer’s epic poetry. Despite an overwhelmingly popular extant English edition of the Iliad by George Chapman, Hobbes chose to proffer his own account, often taking great liberties with the source material. Juxtaposed against Chapman’s translation, we see that Hobbes implicitly critiques the political philosophy it commends—a philosophy which disrespects kingly power, misunderstands sovereign authority, and abdicates human virtue. Hobbes sees these elements as corrupting the poetic imagination of England, precipitating much of the unrest we see in the seventeenth century. In correcting and reframing these tales for a new world, Hobbes provides a moral scaffolding for his political philosophy through one of the most widely read classical texts of his time.

Kant begins the 1781 Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason with a history of metaphysics told as a sequence of failed political regimes. This history has been largely passed over both in the literature on Kant’s metaphysics and in that on his political philosophy. This article provides an interpretation of Kant’s history of metaphysical regimes as a way of exploring the political themes and aims of the First Critique. Kant’s opening narrative articulates the role his critique of metaphysics plays in establishing the possibility of a lawful order of reason that defends morality against threats arising from reason’s theoretical dissatisfaction. The political history of metaphysics presented in the A Preface reveals Kant’s understanding of the public role philosophy must undertake in the context of the modern crisis of reason.

Alexis de Tocqueville highlights a paradox at the heart of the democratic spirit. Egalitarians are allergic to markers of social hierarchy and are on the hunt to identify and abolish remnants of the old regime’s entrenchment of aristocratic rank. The resulting abolition of personal hierarchy, however, does not deliver equality and freedom. Rather it inclines democrats to accept depersonalized forms of discipline at the hands of public opinion, the tutelary state, and the market economy. Tocqueville argues that the commitment to an “imaginary equality” lies at the root of the soft despotism he finds across democratized institutions, mores, and economic relationships. He develops a distinct account of the emergence of domination under conditions of formal equality. Social dependence in liberal societies does not derive from a new class of elites or the rise of capitalist economic formations. Equality is itself connected to new, impersonal forms of servitude.

The Currency of Politics is a major contribution to the history of economic thought, a history too often neglected by political theorists. Especially important are Eich’s arguments about the fragility of trust, and the way in which money both enables and undermines such trust. In his words, monetary trust “does not simply imply the enforcement of existing contracts but the realization of a more fundamental, and more equitable, social contract that requires a sharing of sacrifices and benefits. … In a democratic society monetary trust must be tied to a negotiation over justice” (18). In discussing Aristotle and the Greek world, Eich retrieves claims about the role of currency in contributing to reciprocal justice, especially if not exclusively in democracies. Money is a tool of reciprocity and equality—coinage can enable the spread of a “specifically egalitarian political ideology” (37). Money enables us to recognize injustices, and “possibly, amend them. Currency contains within itself the necessary condition for its own improvement” (27).

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 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

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).

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.