Description
Central bank independence and their economic governance is a growing field of research as monetary institutions evolve. The current debate on the legitimacy of these independent institutions examine the degrees of their politicisation or depoliticisation, but rather than arguing on degrees of politicisation or depoliticisation of central banks, my research aims to look at how central banks exist within this constructed space, applying Polanyi’s theoretical framework that the political and the economic are artificially separated and necessary for institutional capitalism to be more than “merely a function of the social order” (2001, p. 74) and eventually subordinate society. In the United States of America (hence: United States), the belief that “political freedom requires an unshakeable moral foundation that only religion can supply” (Holloway, n.d.) is still shaping society and dominant in American political thought. Research on civil religion in the United States is ongoing, from Robert Bellah’s civil religion to Andrew Whitehead’s Christian nationalism, the American public shares a religious dimension that has historically developed institutions and legitimated political authority. This promience was revealed in a 2019 study to show that most Americans adopt and reproduce secularised evangelical discourse (SED: political statements with roots in evangelical Christian history) regardless of their own religious beliefs. Many scholars studying the influence of American civil religion look at how the religious dimension is utilised by either political bodies or the public. However, I aim to examine how the ‘moral foundation that only religion can supply’ is used by economic institutions, specifically the Federal Reserve (Holloway, n.d.), as a legitimation tool and a way to inform social relations. I will employ a Foucaultian methodology to create a genealogy with a thematic analysis of Federal Reserve discourse from 1970 to 2023 and a discourse analysis of key texts. My research will contribute to a better understanding on how central banks legitimise their power.
