Introduction

This is a reading list for anyone interested in digging deep into the concept of money.

The list is organised into three buckets: foundational books and canonical articles; central-banking-specific literature; and thinkers-as-thinkers, each with one or two signature works and a short note on why they matter.

A. Foundational books and canonical articles

A.1 Primary historical sources (pre-1950)

Knapp, Georg Friedrich (1905, Eng. trans. 1924). The State Theory of Money. Macmillan, London. Open PDF (cnqzu.com archive)

The foundational modern statement of chartalism. Contemporary MMT and state-theory argument descends from this text.

Mitchell-Innes, Alfred (1913, 1914). “What is Money?” and “The Credit Theory of Money.” Banking Law Journal, May 1913 and Dec/Jan 1914. Open HTML (community-exchange.org)

The clearest English-language articulation of the credit theory of money — the theory Keynes called “a remarkable piece of work” in 1914. Essential for any defensible treatment of endogenous money and the credit-theory tradition.

Menger, Carl (1892). “On the Origins of Money.” Economic Journal, 2(6), 239–255. Open PDF (mises.org)

The canonical “spontaneous order” / barter-to-commodity account that Graeber attacks. One cannot assess the barter debate without reading Menger first-hand.

Wicksell, Knut (1898, Eng. trans. 1936). Interest and Prices: A Study of the Causes Regulating the Value of Money. Macmillan, London. Book page (mises.org)

Origin of the natural-rate concept and the cumulative-process model; intellectual ancestor of the Taylor rule and of much of Woodford 2003.

Keynes, John Maynard (1930). A Treatise on Money (2 vols). Macmillan, London. HET profile & sources

Keynes’s own two-volume monetary theory, substantially richer and more banking-centric than the General Theory.

Simmel, Georg (1900/1907). Philosophie des Geldes / The Philosophy of Money. Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig. English translation, Routledge, 1978/2004. Open archive (archive.org)

The first book-length philosophical treatment of money as a cultural-sociological form.

A.2 Post-war canonical works (1944–2000)

Polanyi, Karl (1944). The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, Boston. Open PDF

The pivot from Durkheim/Simmel sociology to modern political economy of money. The “fictitious commodities” chapter (esp. money, land, labour) is the canonical account of how monetary governance creates and destabilises markets.

Friedman, Milton and Anna J. Schwartz (1963). A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton University Press, NBER series. Publisher page

The definitive monetarist historiography. Even if one might reject its theoretical conclusions, its method (archival monetary history coupled with statistical analysis) is the standard against which any history of monetary regimes is measured.

Hayek, Friedrich A. (1976). Denationalisation of Money. Institute of Economic Affairs, London. 3rd ed. 1990. Publisher page (IEA)

Intellectual forefather of cryptocurrency. Essential for a serious engagement with the digital-money debate and for the broader question of whether money is necessarily a sovereign artefact.

Kindleberger, Charles P. (1978/2015). Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. 7th ed. with Robert Z. Aliber. Palgrave Macmillan. Publisher page (Springer)

The empirical companion and corrective to Minsky. Provides the historical breadth that Minsky’s FIH needs in order to stand as more than a theoretical construction.

Ingham, Geoffrey (2004). The Nature of Money. Polity Press, Cambridge. Publisher page

The most influential recent sociological-institutional synthesis of the credit theory. Ingham articulates money as a social relation of accounting and credit, grounded in state authority; a core theoretical reference.

Wray, L. Randall, ed. (2004). Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes. Edward Elgar. Publisher page

Wray’s edited volume pairs the original Mitchell-Innes essays with modern critical commentary. The best single entry point for situating credit-theory in the larger heterodox tradition.

A.3 Contemporary milestones (2000–2024)

Woodford, Michael (2003). Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy. Princeton University Press. Publisher page

The definitive articulation of the New Keynesian, “moneyless” framework that dominates central-bank research.

Mehrling, Perry (2011). The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort. Princeton University Press. Publisher page

Reconstructs post-2008 central banking as a “money view” of hierarchical credit. The conceptual bridge between Minsky, Bagehot and contemporary central-bank practice.

Desan, Christine (2014). Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism. Oxford University Press. Publisher page (OUP)

Reconstructs money as a constitutional-legal project. Desan’s “constitutional theory of money” is the signature move of current political-theory-of-money scholarship.

Tucker, Paul (2018). Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State. Princeton University Press. Publisher page

The most sophisticated recent defence — and the most honest recent account of the difficulties — of central-bank independence, written by a former deputy governor of the Bank of England.

Pistor, Katharina (2019). The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. Princeton University Press. Publisher page

Shows how legal coding transforms claims into capital — including quasi-monetary instruments. Vital for understanding why private credit acquires state-like monetary force and why shadow banking is a constitutional issue, not merely a regulatory one.

Eich, Stefan (2022). The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes. Princeton University Press. Publisher page

A political-theory history of money that explicitly reads Aristotle, Locke, Fichte, Marx and Keynes as monetary thinkers.

A.4 Key peer-reviewed articles

McLeay, Michael, Amar Radia and Ryland Thomas (2014). “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1. Bank of England PDF

The Bank of England’s explanaition of how commercial banks create money endogenously.

Goodhart, Charles A. E. (1998). “The Two Concepts of Money: Implications for the Analysis of Optimal Currency Areas.” European Journal of Political Economy, 14(3), 407–432. Journal page

Goodhart contrasts the metallist and chartalist theories of money and argues that the euro is built on the weaker of the two. Foundational for any critique of the ECB’s constitutional construction.

Borio, Claudio (2014). “The Financial Cycle and Macroeconomics: What Have We Learnt?” Journal of Banking & Finance, 45, 182–198. (Orig. BIS Working Paper No. 395, 2012.) BIS Working Paper 395

The empirical counterpart to Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis — written from inside the central-banking establishment. Combines rigorous empirics with strong theoretical implications about monetary and macroprudential policy.

Lenza, Michele and Jiri Slacalek (2018). “How Does Monetary Policy Affect Income and Wealth Inequality?” ECB Working Paper No. 2190. ECB PDF

Rigorous empirical study of distributional consequences of unconventional monetary policy in the euro area.

Blinder, Alan S. et al. (2008). “Central Bank Communication and Monetary Policy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Economic Literature, 46(4), 910–945. AEA / JEL page

The authoritative survey of how central-bank communication became a policy instrument in its own right — critical for any philosophical inquiry into the performative dimension of monetary authority.

Fontana, Giuseppe and Marco Veronese Passarella (2020). “Endogenous Money Theory: Tracing the Route from 1923 to 2017.” Cambridge Journal of Economics. Journal page

A rigorous historiography of the endogenous-money tradition over nearly a century — the kind of longue-durée article.

Tucker, Paul (2022). Global Discord: Values and Power in a Fractured World Order. Princeton University Press. Publisher page

Extends Unelected Power to the international order, including the political economy of reserve currencies and cross-border central-bank cooperation.

B. Central banking: dedicated literature

B.1 Foundational texts

Bagehot, Walter (1873). Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. Henry S. King & Co., London. Open (Project Gutenberg)

The founding text on the lender-of-last-resort doctrine. Every subsequent doctrinal debate — from the 2008 rescues to the ECB’s OMT — is a gloss on Bagehot’s rule. Unavoidable.

Goodhart, Charles A. E. (1988). The Evolution of Central Banks. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Publisher page

The standard institutional-evolutionary account. Goodhart argues that central banks emerge endogenously from payment-system needs and clearing, not from theoretical design.

Bordo, Michael D. and Barry Eichengreen, eds. (1993). A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System. University of Chicago Press / NBER. NBER page

The reference volume on Bretton Woods — the philosophical and institutional crucible of post-war central banking.

Volcker, Paul A. (2018). Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government. Public Affairs, New York. Publisher page

Volcker’s memoir is a primary source on the disinflation of the 1980s and the evolution of central-bank governance. A first-person counterpart to Tucker’s theoretical treatment.

B.2 Independence, legitimacy and the “democratic deficit”

Blinder, Alan S. (2004). The Quiet Revolution: Central Banking Goes Modern. Yale University Press. Publisher page

Blinder’s reflective defence of inflation-targeting and of the delegation model, written by a former Fed vice-chair. Paired with Tucker 2018 for the definitive orthodox defence.

Dietsch, Peter, François Claveau and Clément Fontan (2018). Do Central Banks Serve the People? Polity Press. Publisher page

An explicitly philosophical interrogation of post-2008 central-bank governance and distribution. Written by philosophers and economists.

Goodhart, Charles A. E. and Rosa Lastra (2018). “Populism and Central Bank Independence.” Open Economies Review, 29, 49–68. Journal page (Springer)

A careful exploration of the legitimacy pressures on independent central banks in the populist era.

B.3 The euro as a monetary experiment

James, Harold (2012). Making the European Monetary Union. Harvard University Press. Publisher page

The definitive political-intellectual history of the euro. Written by a historian who had access to the central-bank archives.

Issing, Otmar (2008). The Birth of the Euro. Cambridge University Press. Publisher page

Issing’s first-person account from inside the founding board of the ECB.

B.4 Digital money and CBDC

Bank for International Settlements (2021, 2023). Annual Economic Reports — CBDC chapters. BIS, Basel. BIS AER 2021 Ch.3 (CBDC)

The BIS CBDC chapters are authoritative institutional analysis of central-bank digital currency. Reading them alongside Hayek 1976 gives the philosophical span of the debate.

Brunnermeier, Markus K., Harold James and Jean-Pierre Landau (2019). “The Digitalization of Money.” NBER Working Paper 26300. NBER page

A philosophically-inflected account by two macroeconomists and a historian of how digitalisation is restructuring the monetary system. Short and a useful pivot from history to the digital frontier.

C. Thought-leaders on the subject

C.1 Geoffrey Ingham (sociologist, Cambridge)

Ingham is the pivotal figure in the sociology of money over the past quarter-century. He reformulates the credit theory into a social-relational account and is the bridge between Simmel, Weber, Keynes and Minsky.

Signature works. Ingham, G. (2004). The Nature of Money. Polity. — Ingham, G., ed. (2005). Concepts of Money. Edward Elgar. — Ingham, G. (2020). Money: Ideology, History, Politics. Polity. The Nature of Money (Polity)

Desan’s “constitutional theory of money” is a influential recent move in the politico-legal theory of money. She argues that money is a public project made through legal design, not a private medium that the state regulates.

Signature works. Desan, C. (2014). Making Money. OUP. — Desan, C. (2017). “The Constitutional Approach to Money,” in Bandelj et al., Money Talks. — Just Money project at Harvard Law School. Just Money (Harvard Law)

C.3 Stefan Eich (political theorist, Georgetown)

Eich has done more than any other living writer to reconstitute political theory of money as a recognised subfield. His work is explicitly in dialogue with Aristotle, Locke, Marx and Keynes.

Signature works. Eich, S. (2022). The Currency of Politics. Princeton UP. — Eich, S. (2020). “Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective,” in Regulating Blockchain (OUP). The Currency of Politics (Princeton UP)

C.4 Perry Mehrling (economist, Boston University)

Mehrling’s “money view” treats the financial system as a hierarchy of survival constraints and promises to pay. He reads Bagehot, Minsky and Keynes together and brings the reading to contemporary dealer-of-last-resort central banking.

Signature works. Mehrling, P. (2011). The New Lombard Street. Princeton UP. — Mehrling, P. (2013). “The Inherent Hierarchy of Money,” in Social Fairness and Economics (Routledge). — “Money and Banking” Coursera series. Coursera “Money and Banking” (open)

Pistor’s project locates capital — including quasi-monetary instruments — in the law, not in economic substance.

Signature works. Pistor, K. (2019). The Code of Capital. Princeton UP. — Pistor, K. (2013). “A Legal Theory of Finance.” Journal of Comparative Economics, 41(2). The Code of Capital (Princeton UP)

C.6 Paul Tucker (practitioner-scholar, Harvard Kennedy School)

Tucker is the single most sophisticated contemporary interlocutor on central-bank legitimacy. A former deputy governor of the Bank of England, he writes with inside knowledge but in a register accessible to political theorists.

Signature works. Tucker, P. (2018). Unelected Power. Princeton UP. — Tucker, P. (2022). Global Discord. Princeton UP. Unelected Power (Princeton UP)

C.7 Claudio Borio (economist, BIS)

Borio is a pre-eminent contemporary analyst of the “financial cycle” and the philosophical case for macroprudential policy. He is Minsky-with-data, written from inside the central-banking fraternity.

Signature works. Borio, C. (2014). “The Financial Cycle and Macroeconomics.” JBF. — Borio, C. and P. Disyatat (2011). “Global Imbalances and the Financial Crisis: Link or No Link?” BIS WP 346. BIS author page — Claudio Borio

C.8 Charles Goodhart (economist, LSE)

Goodhart’s institutional histories of central banking, his long-running work on the “two concepts of money,” and his recent writing with Pradhan on demographics and inflation make him the closest living heir to Kaldor and Tobin in the English tradition.

Signature works. Goodhart, C. (1988). The Evolution of Central Banks. MIT. — Goodhart, C. (1998). “The Two Concepts of Money.” EJPE. — Goodhart, C. and M. Pradhan (2020). The Great Demographic Reversal. Palgrave Macmillan. The Evolution of Central Banks (MIT)

C.9 Peter Dietsch and colleagues (philosopher, Victoria)

Dietsch is one of the few academic philosophers writing directly on central-bank governance and distributive justice. With Claveau and Fontan he has produced the most systematic philosophical treatment of post-2008 central banking.

Signature works. Dietsch, Claveau and Fontan (2018). Do Central Banks Serve the People? Polity. — Dietsch (2020). “Money Creation, Debt, and Justice.” Politics, Philosophy & Economics. Do Central Banks Serve the People? (Polity)

C.10 Others worth a deliberate look

Susan Strange — Mad Money (1998); Casino Capitalism (1986); on the political economy of global finance. Manchester / Blackwell. Mad Money (MUP)

Michel Aglietta — La monnaie entre dettes et souveraineté (2016, with Ahmed, Ponsot). Odile Jacob. Publisher page

Wolfgang Streeck — Buying Time (2014); Critical Encounters (2020). Verso. Buying Time (Verso)

Adam Tooze — Crashed (2018); Shutdown (2021). Viking. Crashed (PRH)

Mary Mellor — Money: Myths, Truth and Alternatives (2019). Policy Press. Policy Press page

D.1 The political theory of money

Eich, Stefan (2022). The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes. Princeton University Press. DOI 10.1515/9780691235448. Princeton University Press — book page

Eich reads Aristotle, Locke, Fichte, Marx and Keynes as a single conversation about monetary order.

Kapadia, Anush (2023). A Political Theory of Money. Cambridge University Press. DOI 10.1017/9781009331449. Cambridge Core — book page

Published one year after Eich and explicitly programmatic: Kapadia argues that “money is a political technology” and sketches an institutional theory of monetary hierarchy. Pairs well with Mehrling’s Money View and with Desan’s constitutional approach.

Roy, Suvy (2025). “The Political Theory of Money after the Polycrisis: A Review.” Journal of Political Philosophy, forthcoming. Google Scholar search

The first synoptic review of Eich, Kapadia, Mehrling and Desan as a single emerging sub-field. Useful as a map of the terrain.

D.2 Central-bank legitimacy and the turn to independence-after-QE

Braun, Benjamin (2016). “Speaking to the People? Money, Trust, and Central Bank Legitimacy in the Age of Quantitative Easing.” Review of International Political Economy, 23(6), 1064–1092. DOI 10.1080/09692290.2016.1252415. Taylor & Francis — DOI

Braun coins the problem: how can an unelected central bank retain democratic legitimacy once its balance sheet becomes a distributive instrument?

Dietsch, Peter (2019). “Money Creation, Debt, and Justice.” American Political Science Review (republished as Politics, Philosophy & Economics article, DOI 10.1017/s0003055419000790). SAGE — article page

The philosophical argument that QE creates distributional effects which generate an independent legitimacy problem for central banks. Companion to Braun (2016) and the foundation for Dietsch–Claveau–Fontan (2018).

Dietsch, Peter, Clément Fontan and Jonathan Dion (2022, updated 2024). “Money Talks: The Greening of Central Banking.” Oxford University Press / Environmental Politics, DOI 10.1017/cbo9781108885638.010. OUP — book page

The most philosophically careful treatment of green central banking. Extends the legitimacy argument of Dietsch (2019) to the climate mandate.

Hogenauer, Anna-Lena and David Howarth (2016). “Unconventional Monetary Policies and the European Central Bank’s Problematic Democratic Legitimacy.” ZSE / Journal for Comparative Government and European Policy, 14(2), 131–156. DOI 10.5771/1610-7780-2016-2-131. Nomos — article page

The parallel European account to Braun (2016) — focused on the ECB’s post-2012 “whatever it takes” mandate.

Ferret Mas, Arnau (2023). “Central Bank Independence, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design.” Res Publica, DOI 10.1007/s11158-023-09619-x. Springer — DOI

The sharpest recent analytic-philosophy article on whether central-bank independence can be democratically justified. Argues, against Tucker, that post-2008 CBI is systematically over-extended.

Diessner, Sebastian, Corrado Macchiarelli, Lucia Monti and Claudia Wiesner (2020). “The European Central Bank and Democratic Legitimacy: Accountability and Transparency.” Journal of European Integration, 42(8), 1063–1077. DOI 10.1080/07036337.2020.1853716. Taylor & Francis — DOI

Measures ECB transparency and accountability as legitimacy proxies. Useful empirical counterweight to the purely philosophical literature.

Lastra, Rosa María and Christina Skinner (2022). Research Handbook on Central Banking. Edward Elgar. DOI 10.4337/9781800889361. Edward Elgar — book page

The most comprehensive recent legal-institutional reference on central banking. Chapters by Tucker, Goodhart, Lastra and others.

Macquarie, Rob (2022). “Green Central Banking: Legitimacy, Mandate, and Mission Creep.” New Political Economy, DOI 10.1080/13563467.2022.2130243. Taylor & Francis — DOI

The best recent treatment of the legitimacy risks of green central banking from a political-economy perspective. Valuable counterweight to the normative Dietsch–Fontan line.

Oman, William, Tracy Salin and Romain Svartzman (2024). “The Political Economy of Green Central Banking.” WIREs Climate Change, DOI 10.1002/wcc.914. Wiley — DOI

A 2024 WIREs review that maps the empirical and normative literatures on green central banking. The most efficient way to get the state-of-the-art in one article.

Vestergaard, Jakob (2022). “Monetary Policy for the Climate? A Money View Perspective on Green Central Banking.” Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper 188. INET — working paper

A Danish-authored application of the Mehrling Money View to the green-central-banking question.

F.3 The financial cycle, credit, and the macro-institutional frame

Borio, Claudio, Piti Disyatat and Mikael Juselius (2016). “Rethinking Potential Output: Embedding Information about the Financial Cycle.” BIS Working Papers No. 404 / SSRN 2823454. SSRN — abstract page

The clearest single statement of Borio’s “financial cycle” critique of conventional potential-output estimation.

Borio, Claudio, Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul and Piti Disyatat (2026). “The Natural Rate of Interest: An Institutional Critique.” SSRN Working Paper 6115072. SSRN — abstract page

A 2026 continuation of Borio’s critique, arguing that the natural-rate concept inherits Wicksell’s philosophical confusions.

Bignon, Vincent, Marc Flandreau and Stefano Ugolini (2011). “Bagehot for Beginners: The Making of Lender-of-Last-Resort Operations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Economic History Review, 65(2), 580–608. DOI 10.1111/j.1468-0289.2011.00606.x. Wiley — DOI

The best historical-economic reconstruction of how Bagehot’s rule was actually operationalised before Bagehot wrote it down.

D.4 The chartalism controversy

Rallo, Juan Ramón (2020). “Hyman Minsky, Hayek and Chartalism: A Critique.” History of Political Economy, 52(6), 1175–1201. DOI 10.1215/00182702-8715962. Duke University Press — DOI

Recent Austrian-school critique of chartalism and MMT.

D.5 Method, philosophy of economics, and the metatheory of money

Boulding, Kenneth (1969). “Economics as a Moral Science.” American Economic Review, 59(1), 1–12. JSTOR — article page

Boulding’s AEA presidential address and the single most-cited 20th-century statement of the normative character of economic theorising.

Kay, John and Mervyn King (2020). Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future. Bridge Street Press / W. W. Norton. W. W. Norton — book page

Kay and King are ex-Monetary Policy Committee members writing a philosophically serious defence of Keynesian uncertainty against Bayesian decision theory. A natural modern pairing with Shackle and Keynes’s Treatise on Probability.

D.6 Recent doctoral-style monographs on money

Pistor, Katharina (2020). “The Value of Law.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law / updated edition of The Code of Capital. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge — DOI

A short updating essay by Pistor summarising the Code of Capital thesis for a monetary audience.

Sgambati, Stefano (2022). Rethinking Debt: A History of Capitalism through its Crises. Stanford University Press. Stanford UP — book page

A recent Stanford UP monograph that re-reads the history of capitalism through monetary crises. Provides a useful complement to Graeber’s Debt and Tooze’s Crashed — more academic than Tooze, more rigorous than Graeber.

E. The Summer Reading List

If you have a summer to get into all of this, then here are the key 12 works you might want to focus on: Knapp (1905), Mitchell-Innes (1913–14), Menger (1892), Keynes (1930 Treatise), Polanyi (1944), Bagehot (1873), Goodhart (1988), Ingham (2004), Desan (2014), Tucker (2018), Eich (2022), Braun (2016).