The book investigates the conceptual shifts regarding economic order during two moments of profound crisis in the history of liberalism. In the wake of the French Revolution, Thomas Robert Malthus’s notion of population linked liberalism to a sense of economic necessity that stands counter to political promises of equality. During the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s writings on money proved crucial for the invention of macroeconomic theory and signaled the birth of the managed economy. Both periods, Tellmann shows, entail a displacement of the malleability of the economic. By tracing this conceptual history, Life and Money opens up liberalism, including our neoliberal present, to a new sense of economic and political possibility.

Preface

Introduction: The Economic and the Genealogy of Liberalism

Part I. Life

1. The Invention of Economic Necessity

2. Savage Life, Scarcity, and the Economic

3. The Right to Live: Economic Man, His Wife, and His Fears

Part II. Money

4. The Return of the Political and the Cultural Critique of Economy

5. The Economic Unbound: Material Temporalities of Money

6. The Archipolitics of Macroeconomics

Epilogue: Critical Effects

Notes

Bibliography

Index