Samuel A. Chambers Libri

Every Economics textbook today teaches that questions of values and morality lie outside of, are in fact excluded from, the field of Economics and its proper domain of study, “the economy.” Yet the dominant cultural and media narrative in response to major economic crisis is almost always one of moral outrage. How do we reconcile this tension or explain this paradox by which Economics seems to have both everything and nothing to do with values? The discipline of modern economics hypostatizes and continually reifies a domain it calls “the economy”; only this epistemic practice makes it possible to falsely separate the question of value from the broader inquiry into the economic. And only if we have first eliminated value from the domain of economics can we then transform stories of financial crisis or massive corporate corruption into simple tales of ethics. But if economic forces establish, transform, and maintain relations of value then it proves impossible to separate economics from questions of value, because value relations only come to be in the world by way of economic logics. This means that the “positive economics” spoken of so fondly in the textbooks is nothing more than a contradiction in terms, and as this book demonstrates, there’s no such thing as “the economy.” To grasp the basic logic of capital is to bring into view the unbreakable link between economics and value.

This is a radical book, which brings together the fields of political theory and television studies. In one of the first books to do so, Samuel A. Chambers exposes and explores the cultural politics of television by treating television shows--including Six Feet Under , Buffy , Desperate Housewives , The L Word, and Big Love-- as serious, important texts and reading them in detail through the lens of queer theory. Samuel A. Chambers makes the case for the profound significance of ""the cultural politics of television,"" the way in which a television show's text itself engages with the politics of its day. He argues for queer theory's essential contribution to any understanding of the political, and initiates a larger project of queer television studies. This is an important and fresh contribution to queer theory and to the understanding of television as politics.

A new theory of money is essential, as the prevailing notion taught in introductory textbooks is over a century old and fundamentally flawed. While "heterodox" accounts from the 90s and 00s offer improved descriptions, they still fall short by focusing too much on the failures of orthodoxy and assuming a singular alternative. This work proposes a more nuanced theory, emphasizing that all money is fundamentally credit. It argues that money is not a tangible object but a marker of social relations of credit and debt between parties, devoid of intrinsic value. Furthermore, it asserts that all credit can function as money, as any credit/debt relationship has the potential to be transferred, thus acting as money. The book connects this radical credit theory to contemporary monetary practices, addressing global capital flows, national and international monetary policy, and the dynamics of money markets. It provides a conceptual framework to explore current phenomena, such as Bitcoin and events like GameStop in 2021, prompting critical questions about the nature and future of money in our economy.