ABSTRACT
As the legal profession dominated the founding of the United States, banking dominated the founding of the City of Gold. Financial institutions played lead roles in establishing the City: the Marshall Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Bretton Woods currency arrangement, stabilized by the International Monetary Fund. The very names of these institutions proclaim their lending; our polity is quite literally based upon such debt. One might therefore expect the citizens of the City of Gold to have a sense of what the shape of a financial polity is, in the same way that we have a sense of what the shape of the state is. We “know” that a state is composed of legislative, executive, and judicial elements, discussed in the U.S. Constitution and elsewhere in that order; and we “know” what representative democracy is; and we are quite comfortable endeavoring to establish or reestablish such institutions when states around the planet fail, and to recapitulate such architecture within international institutions. But the citizens of the City of Gold do not have a comparable image of finance. Perhaps it is too soon. Though finance is quite old, we have long organized political thought in terms of the nation or its ideological exaggeration, the Cold War, and have rarely thought of finance as a constitutive process. Now that national categories no longer suffice to organize political thought, however, we really ought to ask what it means to organize a polity, our polity, through finance.1
