A dollar is a dollar—or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing relations to cold, hard cash. After all, it's just money. Or is it? Distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author Viviana Zelizer argues against this conventional wisdom. She shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. Zelizer concentrates on domestic transactions, bestowals of gifts and charitable donations in order to show how individuals, families, governments, and businesses have all prescribed social meaning to money in ways previously unimagined.

Money is both a vibrant, dynamic material substance and a social force that permeates industrial societies in their entirety. Yet significant aspects of how money works in society are concealed by myths, dogmas, and misperceptions. In The Power of Money Henry Bretton focuses on how money works in a democracy. He contends that the well-being of political democracy depends on a fuller understanding of the centrality of money in politics, and he presents his ideas on monetary policy, corruption and reform, banking and politics, private power within a democracy, money in international relations, and the system-destroying effects of money. Bretton considers the subject of money and democracy in the context of how monetarization of societies proceeded form antiquity to the Industrial Revolution, and he analyzes the formative years of the United States in terms of being based on political ideas that did not take account of monetarization. He reviews what social theorists and economists from Aristotle to Friedman have thought about the role of money in society and how it affects individual behavior and social norms. The link between economics and politics has been only partially explored, he contends, and he sees the major task for social scientists as developing a fuller integration of the two mainstreams of social theory, the political and the economic.

The Church and the Market is a vigorous and lively defense of the market economy and a withering attack on all forms of state intervention. It covers labor unions, monopoly, money and banking, business cycles, interest, usury, and much more. Although it makes a particular point of noting the moral arguments of the market economy and that Catholics are of course perfectly at liberty to support it, its audience is much broader than Catholics alone. Readers of all religious traditions and none at all have praised The Church and the Market, first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards, as one of the most compelling and persuasive defenses of capitalism against its critics ever written.

The immense power the Catholic Church once wielded in Ireland has considerably diminished over the last fifty years. During the same period the Irish state has pursued new economic and social development goals by wooing foreign investors and throwing the state's lot in with an ever-widening European integration project. How a less powerful church and a more assertive state related to one another during the key third quarter of the twentieth century is the subject of this book. Drawing on newly available material, it looks at how social science, which had been a church monopoly, was taken over and bent to new purposes by politicians and civil servants. This case study casts new light on wider processes of change, and the story features a strong and somewhat surprising cast of characters ranging from Sean Lemass and T.K. Whitaker to Archbishop John Charles McQuaid and Father Denis Fahey.

The great monopoly in this country is money. So long as that exists, our old variety and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.