1Can there be a truly democratic money, and if so, under what conditions? This question runs as a leitmotiv through the collective volume Monnaie, souveraineté et démocratie edited by Thomas Boccon-Gibod, associate professor of philosophy at the university of Grenoble, and Alban Mathieu, holder of a doctorate in economics. The volume brings together thirteen scholars from economics, philosophy and sociology in what is a timely and readable contribution to the time-honored debate about the nature and purpose of money.

3The book is divided into three thematic sections each of which approaches the conceptual triad mentioned above from different angle. The first thematic section is dedicated to answering the question whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between sovereignty and money on one hand and democracy on the other. In this endeavor, the authors discuss a wide array of topics ranging from Michel Foucault’s work on monetary thought in Ancient Greece (Marie Cuillerai), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari’s writings on the State (Quentin Badaire) to the conditions of possibility for a genuine transnational democracy in the era of economic globalization (Colin Crouch) and the structural constraints that monetary unions impose on sovereign states with respect to their economic policy (Alban Mathieu).

4The epistemic potential of the volume’s original research question is arguably most obvious in this part of the book. The potentially antagonistic relation between monetary sovereignty and democracy is particularly well depicted in Benjamin Lemoine’s contribution to this section. In a fascinating chapter, drawing on numerous examples, Lemoine shows how state bureaucrats actively redefine what “sovereignty” means through their interactions with international private law firms and financial actors. The outcome of this process is that civil servants come to understand “sovereignty” as the state’s capacity to raise funds from private actors and that the demands of creditors vis-à-vis the State progressively outweigh those of the citizenry. It becomes therefore obvious that scholars studying money and finance should not unreflexively equate an increase in monetary sovereignty thusly conceived with a movement towards a more democratic economy. In this way, the chapter provides an interesting counterpoint to much of the critical literature on contemporary financial capitalism where the unifying normative horizon is a more or less unqualified call for a return of the state.

6Turning the section’s general theme upside down, Jean-Francois Ponsot shows how the loss of monetary sovereignty on behalf of the state can actually be an engine of economic democratization. According to Ponsot, such has been the case in Ecuador where the US-Dollar officially replaced the Ecuadorian Sucre as legal tender in 2000. In a surprising turn of events, policymakers in Ecuador, having lost control over their domestic currency, did manage to maintain some control over the national economy. Furthermore, and even more surprisingly, the dollarization of the Ecuadorian economy has limited the potential for collusion between corruptible central bankers and domestic economic elites and thus remedied some of the economic inequities in the country.

7The third and final thematic section is a somewhat eclectic collection of four texts that tackle the issue of utopian forms of money as well as emerging technologies and their relation to the sovereign state and democracy. Here, regarding new technologies, the authors tend to emphasize in particular the challenges to sovereignty and democracy that they pose. Thus, Thierry Ménissier, in a general reflection on the implications of the abundance of digital data and the ever-faster progress being made in the field of artificial intelligence, points out that certain technology corporations progressively come to resemble political communities akin to the state, both in terms of the size of their user communities and regarding their functions. The ambition of Meta to issue its own currency has probably served as a wake-up call to many with respect to these developments. Mathieu Montalban, whose chapter dives into the political dynamics of cryptocurrencies, also signals that they defy the state’s sovereignty, the informatic code of the digital currency essentially coming to assume the role of traditional law. A bit of an outlier because only indirectly concerned with money, sovereignty or democracy, the contribution of Massimo Amato presents the work of Italian economist Claudio Napoleoni and in particular his philosophy of technology which lays the groundwork for a fundamental critique of economic orthodoxy.

9As a whole, Monnaie, souveraineté et démocratie offers a wealth of insights and stimulating ideas about the politics of money. This is in no small part due to the thoughtful problematization formulated in the introduction which allows for a fruitful dialogue between political theory and political economy. Rather than providing a unified framework to study the relation between sovereignty, money and democracy, the volume traces a series of possible and sometimes diverging paths to approach the topic. As a side effect, the reader might sometimes feel at loss as to how certain chapters relate to the book’s initial aim and research question. To some extent, this is of course due to the nature of the book, bringing together a number of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds working on a large variety of topics. Nevertheless, a longer introductive chapter as well as a conclusion recapitulating the main ideas would have helped the author of these lines to better follow the argumentation.