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The study explores the political choices and confl icts inherent in the "technical" specifi cations of any monetary system and some of the social scientifi c implications of the prevailing forms of money in the widest possible sense of the terms. As a constantly evolving social relation, no single theory of money is likely to capture its tremendous capacity for self-transformation. It is argued that the precise manner in which the prevailing forms of fi nancial capital in general and money in particular are socially constructed creates a privileged reality for financial capital which distorts competition among the diff erent factors of production and eliminates money's capacity to accurately capture and reproduce real world economic phenomena – if possible even in theory. Contrary to some of the traditional economistic legitimating narratives for money, it is suggested that control over the issuance and circulation of money may render various aspects of the human governable with a fraction of the resources that might be required to implement comparable combinations of coercion and rewards through alternative institutional mechanisms. While it is far from clear that money can ever be specifi ed in a manner that would solve its inherent political and social confl icts to an extent that would permit "economic" analysis to begin, some of the social and political implications of diff erent types of monetary institutions are often not beyond the reach of public policy decisions. A combination of a seigniorage-based unconditional basic income and a demurrage tax on money is introduced as an example of a specifi c public policy program that could rectify or mitigate some of the polarizing consequences of the prevailing forms of money as well as illuminate the spectrum of political choice inherent in the design of any monetary system. The study explains the continuing signifi cance of a wide spectrum of explanatory frameworks for the nature of money as a function of their strategic political utility rather than empirical accuracy and identifi es four main issue areas as particularly fruitful for further research.

The paper explores the incentive structures and the structurally rigid social hierarchies inherent in the polarizing logic of modern credit money and the mutual constitution of money's sovereign and biopolitical dimensions. It is argued that the monetary system constitutes a major transitory channel for the logic of financial capital to transcend the limitations of sovereign spaces and to transform itself into a biopolitical force. The relationship between the material and the subjective – or the sovereign and the biopolitical – dimensions of money is seen as di-polaric rather than di-chotomic – as a mutually constitutive whole between relational dynamics and the normalizing opportunity structures which govern such interaction. If the sovereign and the biopolitical dimensions of money indeed constitute distinct but inseparable moments of the same totality, there would appear to be more room for strategic combination of heterogeneous analytical practices in emancipatory scholarship than what some of the traditional notions of the epistemological politics of power and sovereignty might suggest.