Scott Ferguson explores the implications of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) for contemporary metaphysics and aesthetics. He asserts that only MMT can rescue society from neoliberal austerity by realizing the potential of money as a boundless public resource with an infinite capacity to serve human and environmental needs. In order to explain the resistance to MMT, Ferguson retraces the prevailing understanding of the money form to the political crises of the fourteenth-century republic of Florence. He presents the art of the Florentine renaissance as a response to these crises and the expression of the obsession with haecceity, or ‘thisness’, which has obscured money’s restorative potential for centuries. He also suggests that the sacramental theology of the thirteenth-century Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas offers a potential path out of the intellectual blind alley of haecceity, towards a just, tolerant, and ecologically sustainable future.
Articles by Brendan Cook
Brendan Cook is a Senior Instructor in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Toronto. His translation of the correspondence of the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press as part of the I Tatti Renaissance Library.