The politics and social life of Bitcoin underline the significance of the new currency

Bitcoin is a technological innovation – a currency that exists outside of the control of any central bank or government. However, there is a gulf between the ideology behind Bitcoin and the practical reality of its operation. The ideology behind Bitcoin treats money as a thing whose production is controlled by technology, not as a process whose value is sustained by its users. But Bitcoin is currently being sustained by sociological features that are directly at odds with the political ideology and theory of money that underpin it. We can only reach a proper understanding of the politics behind Bitcoin once we appreciate that it has a social life, writes Nigel Dodd

Redeeming Simmel's money

Response to HAU Book Symposium on Dodd, Nigel. 2014. The social life of money. Princeton: Princeton University Press

The social life of Bitcoin

This paper challenges the notion that Bitcoin is ‘trust-free’ money by highlighting the social practices, organizational structures and utopian ambitions that sustain it. At the paper’s heart is the paradox that if Bitcoin succeeds in its own terms as an ideology, it will fail in practical terms as a form of money. The main reason for this is that the new currency is premised on the idea of money as a ‘thing’ that must be abstracted from social life in order for to be protected from manipulation by bank intermediaries and political authorities. The image is of a fully mechanized currency that operates over and above social life. In practice, however, the currency has generated a thriving community around its political ideals, relies on a high degree of social organization in order to be produced, has a discernible social structure, and is characterized by asymmetries of wealth and power that not dissimilar from the mainstream financial system. Unwittingly, then, Bitcoin serves as a powerful demonstration of the relational character of money

Afterword

This article discusses various challenges to the classical view of money as primarily a quantitative medium that contributes to the spread of a calculative attitude in our relations. Often associated with Georg Simmel and other social thinkers such as Weber, this somewhat dystopian view of money has more recently been given fresh impetus by a number of ‘post-crash’ publications that cast money as a root cause of increasing debt, greed, and irresponsible banking. Against this, I argue for a more nuanced, qualitatively rich perspective on money, one that is evident in this collection, which undertakes what might be called a ‘qualitative’ analysis of money’s quantitative features. This special issue presents an approach to money that treats it as a pluralistic phenomenon, with many different sides

Social theory and the sociological imagination: an interview with Nigel Dodd (1 of 2)

Part I of our interview with Nigel Dodd, interviewed by Riad Azar. Nigel Dodd is Professor in the Sociology Department at the LSE. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1991 on the topic of Money in Social Theory, and lectured at the University of Liverpool before joining the LSE in 1995. Nigel’s main interests are in the sociology of money, economic sociology and classical and contemporary social thought. He is author of The Sociology of Money and Social Theory and Modernity (both published by Polity Press). His most recent book, The Social Life of Money, was published by Princeton University Press in September 2014

Social theory and the sociological imagination: an interview with Nigel Dodd (2 of 2)

Part II of our interview with Nigel Dodd, LSE Professor of Sociology, interviewed by Riad Azar. Part I can be found here