264 Reviews
individual-level transformation, when
marshaled, collectively leads to better-
functioning social services. However, Tobis
seems unwilling to acknowledge the inher-
ent precariousness of policy shifts that
come about due to individual characteristics
and motivations of power brokers within
city bureaucracies, social service agencies,
and community organizations. It is not clear
why the roller coaster that has characterized
the delivery of child services in New York
City can be presumed to have permanently
stopped at the station of current reforms
incorporating parents as partners.
The goal of just about every community
organization is to build power, and most
regard the systematic consideration of the
power structure they confront to be a funda-
mental step toward developing a strategy for
obtaining and sustaining their goal. The idea
of enacting social change by identifying sys-
tems at play is rooted in the notion that what
often stands in the way of collective action is
a pervasive sense that problems are caused
by individual failings and that problems dis-
connected from systemic issues are perva-
sive throughout a community. While the sys-
temic issues and power dynamics are not
fully explored, From Pariahs to Partners does
convincingly narrate the story of the creation
of a ‘‘countervailing force’’ in New York
City’s delivery of child welfare services.
The hopeful story of how parents in the
case studies went from ‘‘pariahs,’’ beset
with their personal failings, to partners in
advocating for changes in the child welfare
system is an important contribution in sever-
al academic and nonacademic fields associ-
ated with social services. This is an incredi-
bly useful book for graduate students,
those in social welfare practice, and those
involved in the study and practice of com-
munity organizing.
Contemporary Sociology 44, 2
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Central Bank Independence: Cultural Codes and
Symbolic Performance, by Carlo Tognato.
Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
204 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781137268822.
JOCELYN PIXLEY
Macquarie University, Australia
jocelyn.pixley@mq.edu.au
A book on central banks is welcome, espe-
cially when sociologists rarely look at
them. Carlo Tognato argues that ‘‘indepen-
dence’’ of central banks can gain support
from what he calls ‘‘stability cultures.’’ Cen-
tral bankers defend a ‘‘monetary religion’’—
and if their performances are backed by a sta-
bility culture, their ritualistic, public drama-
tizations can transform a national currency
into a ‘‘sacred national symbol.’’ It implies
a ‘‘reenchantment in the economic arena’’
(pp. 135–6). Tognato uses two banks, the Ger-
man Bundesbank with its ‘‘sacred currency,’’
the former deutschmark, and the new Euro-
pean Central Bank with its ‘‘rather profane
currency, the euro.’’ Independence means
no political interference in central bank
decisions.
His argument is pursued through Jeffrey
Alexander’s ‘‘strong culture’’ approach that
tries to ‘‘uncouple culture from social struc-
ture’’ (p. 16). For Tognato, support for anti-
inflationary monetary policy does not need
popular ‘‘economic literacy’’; instead the
‘‘transformation of price stability into a tran-
scendental value for society’’ is ‘‘sufficient’’
(p. 4). Since the German mark is the only
‘‘national symbol’’ that postwar Germans
could be ‘‘proud of,’’ the link between ‘‘mon-
ey and collective identity’’ has been a cultur-
ally contingent performance only/mostly
achieved in Germany. With the European
Monetary Union of 1999, ‘‘the transubstanti-
ation of the euro into a matter of European
identity has been cursory at best’’ (p. 101).
Tognato uses evidence mostly of German
central bank speeches, which enact a ‘‘moral-
ity play’’ of sacrifice, of inflation as a Faustian
bargain with the devil. He urges central
bankers to emulate the Bundesbank’s perfor-
mative acts.
This bold thesis gives culture a primary
place in central bank debates about indepen-
dence in order to scotch government-created

inflation. I see problems in defending the
Bundesbank’s self-understanding (p. 85),
such as using dichotomous cultural codes
of sacred and profane to interpret money
(defined as currency alone) and Tognato’s
civil/non-civil code as sources of Germany’s
alleged ‘‘stability culture.’’ Given Germany’s
terrible experiences, stability per se may well
be welcome, but possibly for broader stabil-
ity. Can ‘‘culture’’ be related to an aloof cen-
tral bank, independent of democratic
processes?
A short review of a book on central banks
that says nothing of their tasks, bankers to
the government and to commercial banks,
can only marvel at today’s widespread lack
of knowledge. After central banks had
wage inflation targets (state mandates)
with ‘‘independence’’ from around 1990,
commercial bank money grew to the extent
that only three percent of money is the ‘‘cur-
rency’’ (often called high-powered money
for its trustworthiness). The vast bulk of
money we rely on is licensed banks’ money:
97 percent. Central banks collect this data,
and a fascinating detail is why the Bank of
England (in its Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1)
saw fit to lift this taboo about how banks
create most money through the ‘‘deposit-
creating loan,’’ which central banks ‘‘accom-
modate’’ or buy.
Tognato is right that the Bundesbank is fix-
ated against wage inflation: is it the perfect
sacrifice that he claims? Disinflation slows
economic activity: money’s rising value can
bring other instabilities. In Tognato’s divorce
of culture from social relations, lost is how
creditors gain and debtors lose in disinflation,
with the opposite in inflation. Instead, Tognato
casts central bankers as neutral technicians.
Economic sociology has other narratives.
One such narrative is that central banks
from about 1980 neglected bank money crea-
tion, or bank loans expanded economic activ-
ity and jobs—a pre-requisite to minimize
credit inflation, asset inflation, and ultimate-
ly defaults. Instead they crushed wage infla-
tion, Tognato’s discursive enemy, although
monetary policy indirectly attempted to con-
trol bank money creation. This was so indi-
rect (futile) that Deutsche Bank joined the
global credit-creating spree (and bank Libor
and Forex rigging); some Landesbanken
and Industriekreditbank were insolvent in
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Reviews 265
2007 and got bailouts, care of German citi-
zens (Admati and Hellwig, The Bankers’
New Clothes, 2013). Many German cities are
nearly bankrupt, partly from Berlin’s ‘‘bal-
anced budget’’ legislation of 2009.
Tognato argues that Germany’s hyperin-
flation of 1923 is the ‘‘existential threat’’
(p. 101) that focused Germany after World
War II on a stability culture. In 2010 a curious
reprinting of Ferguson’s 1975 hyperinflation
book, When Money Dies, came out. It is the
Bundesbank’s script (Turner 2013), not on
how ‘‘money died’’ via banks in 2008 or
how hyperinflation (France likewise) after
World War I was no luxury stimulus but
from war finance. Worse, for Germany, the
avowed wish of the victors was to destroy
the German economy with war reparations
(see Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of
Peace, 1920). Weimar democracy lost the
monopoly of violence. The entire society was
torn apart, but its hyperinflation tried to
reduce the value of this hated, crippling debt
and repel French reoccupation of the Ruhr.
What Tognato could look at is André Orléan’s
Durkheimian account (2013) of the ‘‘miracle’’
of blind faith in money per se, whereby hyper-
inflation was stopped overnight with the
introduction of the Rentenmark.
Another huge gap in German elite recall is
the Great Depression. The book says nothing
of Germany’s experience, only American
elites’ recollection of theirs when the
2007–08 crisis began. Debt deflation vies for
first place with hyperinflation in bankrupt-
cies and economic collapse. Ben Bernanke
(2000) is its noteworthy student: Germany’s
Depression before the 1929 crash (because
Wall Street banks withdrew from financing
Germany’s reparations, to join the U.S.
boom), was longer, the Reichsbank the
harshest in applying gold standard austerity,
and nearly every argument is that it helped
the Nazi takeover. The Reichsbank thereup-
on financed the Nazi economy’s rear-
mament. And postwar, the most generous
funding ever, the U.S. Marshall Plan,
brought West Germany alive. These histori-
cal repressions are not in the morality play
of the (postwar) Bundesbank and Tognato.
The question then becomes one of accurate-
ly matching historical memory with the sig-
nificant events and their causes, in place of
a cultural mythohistory.
Contemporary Sociology 44, 2
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A current repression is Germany’s highly
coordinated unions previously banished
under Nazi rule. Bob Hancké (2013) says
one reason for Germany and other D-Mark
bloc countries moving to export dependency
(later austerity as a raison d’état) is their cen-
tral place for unions. IG Metall (the big
union) produced consistent disinflation:
with their productivity gains (and shorter
work hours with job security) industrial
companies had to train workers and pro-
duce up-market and capital-intensive goods.
Such employment stability looks good! Much
of Europe went into debt to buy Germany’s
department I goods: no creditor without
a debtor (and with weak, disorganized
unions). Berlusconi undermined Italy’s
economy by deregulating the labor market
and ending productivity ‘‘social pacts.’’
To Tognato, Greece caused Europe’s woes
(pp. 91–2); another narrative is the ECB. It
‘‘averages’’ inflation rates across Europe
and formerly sovereign states cannot use
monetary or exchange rate policies to correct
either inflation or disinflation. The ECB kept
the entire EU on a restrictive monetary policy
but, Hancké shows, exacerbated differences
(2013). With wage inflation in the ‘‘rest of
Europe’’ from disorganized unions—service
sector demands (e.g., surgeons) and decline
in industrial productivity—and disinflation
in ‘‘D-bloc’’ countries, ECB interest rates
work against solving either divergent prob-
lem. Low interest in wage inflating econo-
mies and high rates in disinflating ones
were disastrous (long before tiny Greece’s
specific clientelism became public). Low
interest fostered private bank speculation
(Spain, Ireland) and debts for buying Ger-
many’s stuff (itself in slump). Capital flowed
to Germany after the 1999 Euro launch, an
imbalance that grew well before 2007. And
who lends to the ‘‘rest of Europe’’? German
and French banks. The ECB created tragic
disunity that no ‘‘morality play’’ of Tognato’s
can unite.
I cannot see a stability culture for monetary
policy ‘‘independence,’’ but rather for
broader stability. Money needs a viable sov-
ereign state and its taxpayers for credibility
(Ingham 2004). Central banks are weak go-
betweens, of the state and the finance sector,
for social conflicts over the production of
money. The ECB in this view has the most
Contemporary Sociology 44, 2
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invidious position (Pixley et al. 2013). Togna-
to’s wish to ‘‘uncouple’’ a purported inde-
pendent central bank culture from divergent
labor relations and creditors versus debtors,
money’s institutions, is pretty ambitious.
References
Bernanke, B. S. 2000. Essays on the Great Depression.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hancké, Bob. 2013. Unions, Central Banks and
EMU. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Ingham, Geoffrey. 2004. The Nature of Money. Cam-
bridge, UK: Polity.
Orléan, André. 2013. ‘‘Money: Instrument of
Exchange or Social Institution of Value?’’ pp.
46–69 in Financial Crises and the Nature of Capi-
talist Money, edited by J. F. Pixley and G. C. Har-
court. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pixley, J. F., S. Whimster, and S. Wilson. 2013.
‘‘Central Bank Independence: A Social Eco-
nomic and Democratic Critique.’’ The Economic
and Labour Relations Review 24(2):32–50.
Turner, Adair. 2013. ‘‘Debt, Money and Mephis-
topheles: How Do We Get Out of This Mess?’’
Cass Business School, London, UK: 6 February.
Accessed 9.2.2013. http://www.fsa.gov.uk/
library/communication/speeches/2013/0206-at.
Teaching Marianne and Uncle Sam: Public
Education, State Centralization, and Teacher
Unionism in France and the United States, by
Nicholas Toloudis. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press, 2012. 213 pp.
$64.50 cloth. ISBN: 9781439909065.
E. IAN ROBINSON
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
eian@umich.edu
Public-sector teachers are tremendously
important politically for four reasons: (1)
they are found in every village, town, and
city (only the postal service is as territorially
ubiquitous) and so constitute a potential
nationwide power base; (2) because teaching
is inherently labor intensive, there are a lot of
teachers: when they unionize, they are often
the biggest unions in the country; (3) such
teachers are the public employees who inter-
act most often, and in the largest numbers,
with the citizenry; and, last but not least, (4)
the work that teachers do, both the subject
matter they convey and the processes by