Government Professor Stefan Eich Wins 2024 Spitz Book Prize
Stefan Eich, an assistant professor of government in the College of Arts & Sciences, has won the 2024 David and Elaine Spitz Prize for his book, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes.
Awarded by the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT), the prize is given annually for the best book or books in liberal and/or democratic theory published two years earlier. Previous winners include prominent political philosophers, theorists and scientists.
Shannon Stimson, a professor in the Department of Government, won the 2011 Spitz Prize for the book, After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy, written with co-author Murray Milgate.
“It’s an extraordinary honor to be recognized in this way by the prize committee and by my colleagues,” Eich says. “I find myself in intimidatingly illustrious company among an incredible list of political theorists I greatly admire. Most gratifying is, however, the thought that readers with very different backgrounds have been able to get something out of the book.”
According to the book’s publisher, The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to the current time to provide an intellectual history of money. CSPT’s prize committee commended Eich’s book for compellingly arguing that “money is not merely a medium of exchange but a foundational site of political struggle.”
“Challenging the long-standing assumption that the topic of monetary policy belongs to economics rather than political theory, Eich shows that money has always been a site of political contestation and a medium through which competing visions of freedom, justice and equality are institutionalized,” the committee writes.
As someone first trained in economics and philosophy, Eich says the history excavated in the book reflects his own intellectual journey in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
“The book embodies my insistence on straddling and combining different disciplinary perspectives to provide a richer and more nuanced account of how societies past and present have thought about money and power,” Eich says, “and what we can learn from this for improving our own deeply imperfect institutions.”
In the book, Eich, who teaches political theory and the history of political thought at Georgetown, examines political theories of money from philosophers like Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.
“The Currency of Politics is both ground-clearing and generative: it maps the historical mechanisms by which money has been depoliticized and recovers its latent democratic possibilities,” CSPT’s prize committee writes. “It offers a powerful conceptual framework for understanding money as a political institution – and an urgent invitation for political theorists to take the politics of monetary systems seriously.”
Eich hopes that readers of the book gain a newfound sense of the peculiarities of money as not just an economic tool but also a law-like institution of rule, power and justice.
“Money is both weirder and more interesting than you might have realized,” he says. “Money turns out to be a surprisingly central dimension of more familiar debates about how to live together, how to share power and how to decide who should rule.”
–Kelyn Soong