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[...] central banks have historically moved back and forth between very different institutional forms: private, public and various combinations of the two. Far from constituting a rational-functionalist formation, they have performed widely diverse and often barely related functions—from the admini…

[...] Finance can only be what it is if it partakes in the state, and the state develops into a value-creating economic agent as it extracts seigniorage from its money production and invites the financial industry to cash in. In fact, according to Vogl, states became sovereign by co-opting finance …

[...] State power and finance are, in fact, Siamese twins, sometimes at odds with one another but always interdependent. Money is, as it were, the oldest public–private partnership: at one and the same time private property and public good; tradeable commodity and central-bank monopoly; credit and …

[...] How money came to be what it is today, in capitalist modernity, may perhaps with the benefit of hindsight be reconstructed as a process of progressive dematerialization and abstraction, accompanied by growing commodification and state sponsorship. But how money functions in its present hist…

‘Desperate optimism’ was a para-Gramscian phrase current in Scrutiny circles in the latter years of the journal, and the ambiguous precedent of Leavisian ‘criticism’ is a restless presence in North’s history. Leavis and his co-thinkers fought a long war for the training of sensibility as they under…