I am a sociologist who interrogates the historically changing politics of money creation in British colonial America and the United States. In a series of articles and a book (Moral Economies of Money, Stanford University Press), I show how that for centuries, large groups understood money creation as a political practice and attempted to redesign the institutions that create money. I also discuss how and why public monetary controversies receded and re-emerged periodically, and show how debate or silence about money creation shaped possibilities for collective life. This historical and theoretical project is grounded in a commitment to democratizing socio-economic life today.
I teach a range of undergraduate and graduate courses on money and debt, human rights, social justice and migration. While factual information is important, I understand teaching above all as a process of familiarizing students with concepts and ways of thinking that may be new to them. I want learners to make their initial commitments more explicit and reconsider everyday lives in their institutional context through various theoretical lenses. I want them to be able to make informed choices about sociological frameworks, adopt or reject these lenses, and use them to analyze situations outside of the classroom.
Education
PhD, Binghamton University | MA, University of Vienna, Austria | DEUG, Marc Bloch University, France
Awards
Dissertation Year Fellowship, Binghamton University, 2014 | Social Science Research Council-DPDF Fellowship, 2008 | Graduate Scholars' Award, Binghamton University, 2006 | Fulbright Fellowship, 2006
Recent Publications
Feinig, Jakob. (forthcoming 2022). Moral Economies of Money: Politics and the Monetary Constitution of Society. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
Feinig, Jakob. (forthcoming 2022). "Money, Water, and the Job Guarantee." In Care, Climate and Debt: Transdisciplinary Problems and Possibilities ed. B. Wilson. London: Palgrave.
Valayden, Diren, and Jakob Feinig. 2022 (forthcoming). "Humanization as Money: Modern Monetary Theory and the Critique of Race." Humanity 13 (2).
Feinig, Jakob. 2022. "Fünf Thesen zu einer moralischen Ökonomie des Geldes." In makronom. [in German]
Feinig, Jakob, and Diren Valayden. 2021. "The Pedagogy of the Job Guarantee." Radical Teacher 119 (Spring).
Feinig, Jakob. 2020. "Toward a Moral Economy of Money? Money as a Creature of Democracy." Journal of Cultural Economy 13 (5):531-47.
Feinig, Jakob. 2020. "Notes on Monetary Institutions in State and Class Formation Processes." Journal of Historical Sociology 33 (4):601-13.
Feinig, Jakob. 2018. "Beyond Double Movement and Re-regulation: Polanyi, the Organized Denial of Money Politics, and the Promise of Democratization." Sociological Theory 36 (1):67–87.
Feinig, Jakob. 2017. "The Moral Economy of Money between the Gold Standard and the New Deal." Journal of Historical Sociology 20 (2):315–41.