Money

This study examines whether non-conventional monetary policies adopted within the European Monetary Union following successive financial and economic crises, particularly through Open Market Operations, have, in practice, amounted to forms of inflationary monetary financing prohibited by the Treaties of the European Union, notably Article 123 TFEU. It argues that expansive discretionary interpretations of central-bank mandates risk enabling hidden fiscal transfers and artificially inflationary demand for market instruments, thereby undermining the price stability mandate. -/- Drawing on principles of legal governance, monetary (...) law, inflation understood as the depreciation of a currency’s purchasing power, and philosophical constraints on sovereignty under the rule of law, the study argues that Member States bear a dual responsibility to preserve the common currency as a system-wide unit of account while exercising their economic competences within the coordinated framework of European Union economic governance. -/- The analysis further contends that while national or supranational monetary authority must remain normatively connected to real economic meaning in order to remain compatible with the constitutional principles of the rule of law, such a substantive conception simultaneously increases the risk of discretionary intervention. For this reason, institutional arrangements capable of constraining discretion become necessary, particularly the legal separation between fiscal and monetary spheres as a safeguard for EU fiscal rules and price stability. The study therefore proposes a framework for the European Banking Union grounded in structural separation, limited discretion, and coordinated competences, aimed at ensuring a triadic balance between price stability, financial stability, and competition. (shrink)

This paper presents Adam Smith's account of the origins of money. It is famously rejected by historians and anthropologists. But it contains a useful warning against over-specialization and allows us to identify a value of premise-by-premise reconstructions: it can function as a kind of money. Speaking of traps, when I think of philosopher Saul Kripke on the surprise exam paradox and how I can become more like Kripke, I think it would lead to me falling into a trap. A first (...) appendix concerns third or fourth rate books kept in a cull. A second appendix concerns a**holes by custom ("No talk of this being a Helen Beebee imitation today?") NOTE: you probably need to download this paper. Above is the abstract. (shrink)

Ist die Begrenzung von staatlichen Ausgaben und Haushaltsdefiziten wirklich im Sinne der Generationengerechtigkeit? Wer begreift, wie unser Geldsystem tatsächlich funktioniert, muss diese Frage eindeutig und vehement verneinen.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that financial economics must be understood as management thought. Key financial economic theories advocate a specific view of management and organizations, namely the maximization of shareholder value (wealth). This study’s methodology is a narrative history of three financial economic theories and their connection to the organizational purpose of maximizing shareholder value. The three theories are Fisher’s capital-income theory, Ronald Coase’s view of firms underlying transaction cost economics, and agency theory. These three financial (...) theories build the same theory, namely Fisher’s capital-income theory. This theory claims that future monetary flows (wealth) paid to shareholders discounted by a compound rate can explain markets, firms’ prices, and even capitalism. Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller relaunched this theory. Coase’s view of firms addresses a difficulty in capital-income theory: if markets are perfect, why is there a need for firms to partially organize production outside the market system? Coase’s answer is because of the costs of using the market price mechanism in the allocation of resources, which reduce the forecasts of future economic benefits. Otherwise, the market would be applied to allocate resources. This view was later developed into transaction cost economics by Oliver Williamson and other scholars. The agency theory from Michael Jensen and William Meckling is just an application of capital-income theory, where firms exist to increase shareholders’ wealth, and managers should receive large salaries and bonuses to ensure this. Agency costs are a type of transaction cost economics that explains the existence of firms. Future research can explore the relevance of financial economic theories for management thought and practice. This study was developed exclusively from document (archival) evidence. A better understanding of this source of management thought may be helpful for developing new management theories. This study demonstrates that financial economic theories contain important elements of management thought, although they are often classified as unrelated to management theory. It provides a narrative history of financial economic theories related to shareholder value constructs. (shrink)

This paper presents a robust stage-based system for equitable resource allocation, using water as a proxy for all essential resources and Bitcoin (B1) as Earth’s primary currency. The system ensures fairness by resetting Bitcoin’s value to 1 water unit post-hack, progressively eliminating malicious actors via an infinite Bitcoin trap (B2), and updating block hashes with new timestamps to counter blockchain hacks without re-mining. A key principle is that the Bitcoin genesis block hash, created by Satoshi Nakamoto (000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f), is the only (...) constant hash across all Bitcoin-based systems, holding intrinsic value greater than all hackers’ wealth combined. This hash anchors trust, immutability, and fairness, ensuring Satoshi symbolically retains 1 BTC as the system’s cornerstone. Simulations confirm the system supports non-malicious individuals, eliminates hackers, and upholds the genesis hash’s primacy, aligning with economic principles (Smith, 1776; Keynes, 1936) and systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1956). (shrink)

One famous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) is the dialogue between the young Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the expert trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna is complaining that the stock market is unpredictable; it’s “fugazi … it’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist. It’s never landed. It is not matter. It’s not on the element chart. It’s not real”. But the fact that something is unpredictable and non-physical does not imply that it does not exist. On the (...) other hand, its unpredictability, non-physicality, and the fact that the stock market trend is largely determined by investors’ beliefs, do make its nature difficult to grasp. -/- This special issue of Rivista di Estetica aims to explore the financial sector from an ontological point of view. While the ontology of money has been extensively studied, few scholars have focused on the stock market and, more generally, on those entities belonging to the investment landscape. Matters are made more complicated by the fact that the financial sector is characterized by an ever-increasing use of digital technology, including software elements that trade in the market themselves. We believe that a careful study of this phenomenon may help us better to understand the role of artificial agents in the social world. (shrink)

Political economy has two major concepts of capital. In one, capital is defined as money. Adam Smith proposed the other, which considers capital as anything that has a role in the creation of wealth even if peripheral. It includes, for instance, machines, the biosphere (“nature capital” or “natural capital”), and even human beings (“human capital”). The concept of capitalism is generally derived from Smith's overinclusive concept of capital. This led to ambiguity and tautology. However, the pre-Smith concept of capital does (...) not require the concept of capitalism. By removing non-monetary elements from the concept of capital, this study reaches an alternative ‘monetary society in the biosphere’ concept, which avoids confusion regarding monetary and non-monetary flows. This new concept integrates the economic and societal production in the biosphere. Furthermore, it recognizes that various monetary flows can be detrimental to ecological crises. Abandoning the concept of capitalism can contribute to conceptual precision in addressing the political economy of societal, environmental, and green development phenomena. (shrink)

While most discussions of generative AI center on issues such as algorithmic bias and disinformation, we should also consider the quantitative sea change brought about by these technologies. Large language models or LLMs can generate contents at a rate uncoupled from the human datasets they were trained on. Forecasts about such artificial outputs are difficult to make, but it seems clear that the word count and image/video bank of the internet will grow far beyond what humans actually produce. Although this (...) growth may seem benign, I worry that it results in a semiotic inflation capable of devaluing many human experiences. What connects quantitative and normative considerations is scarcity. The basic idea is simple: When you discover a diamond, you become rich. When you discover two diamonds, you become twice as rich. However, when you discover a stash of diamonds so large that diamonds outnumber gravel, you become poor—and instantly make every diamond owner poorer too. Similarly, AI’s vast output risks devaluing experiences that are vital to human flourishing. Adopting a wide evolutionary vantage that gives weight to proven cultural adaptations, I suggest that some situations have natural sign-to-object ratios. Hence, when users are flooded with too many signs, they can go against their long-term interests. Critics of AI typically cling to features that computers allegedly cannot mimic. Semiotic inflation, however, lets us grant the possibility of perfect AI counterfeits while still detecting them en masse, via their negative experiential effects. Hardcoded features like Bitcoin’s 21 million token ceiling show that “[i]n contrast to the linguistic sign, the money sign cannot be reproduced in arbitrary quantity” (Bankov 2023: 117). Prompted by the rise of generative AI, I surmise that non-monetary signs also cannot be reproduced in arbitrary quantity. I thus draw parallels between healthy semiotic systems and the constraints governing viable monetary systems. (shrink)

L’une des tâches centrales de la théorie politique normative est d’imaginer et de défendre des alternatives plus justes au système économique et social actuel. Dans ce but, les chercheurs et chercheuses doivent nécessairement spéculer sur la nature des scénarios alternatifs possibles, mais encore inexistants. Grâce à l’étude d’une branche relativement récente de la théorie politique contemporaine (la théorie politique de la finance), cet article vise à étudier une question générale : Quelle doit être l’attitude du chercheur ou de la chercheuse (...) face aux nécessaires incertitudes empiriques inhérentes à sa tâche? En chemin, l’article identifie trois problèmes principaux auxquels fait face la littérature : un manque de clarté et de rigueur dans la définition des alternatives étudiées, un niveau élevé d’incertitudes concernant les effets attendus de ces alternatives, et une relation problématique entre le choix de l’alternative défendue et l’évaluation normative du statu quo. L’article se conclut par plusieurs recommandations visant à remédier à ces problèmes. (shrink)

A wide variety of new forms of money have been developed in recent decades as a challenge or complement to the official, dominant currencies. LETS, Local Currencies, Carbon Currencies and Bitcoins are all examples of this new trend. These currencies are at the heart of a larger movement that questions the present state of money and argues that new currencies might help to build resilient economies and “warmer” social relations. -/- This book focuses on radical alternative proposals as well as (...) on small-scale experiments, and makes use of the analytical tools of philosophy and of economics, with one main question in mind: Can alternative currencies constitute desirable alternatives to the present monetary system? Overall, the book will raise serious doubts regarding the capacity of such currencies to deliver on their promises. In part, it will show that several arguments in favour of alternative currencies are lacking in consistency and clarity, and are thus in need of thorough revision. More fundamentally, it will argue that these currencies either fail to fulfil their objectives or that their fulfilment would entail significant conflicts with justice and economic efficiency. -/- This book is addressed to researchers in economics, politics, and philosophy of money, especially those working on alternative monetary systems. (shrink)

Once widely accepted among economists and philosophers, the commodity theory of money—the idea that money is fundamentally a commodity used as a medium of exchange—has since fallen out of favor due to strong objections raised against it. This paper argues for a refined version of the commodity theory—the pure commodity theory—which strips away the excess baggage of the standard commodity theory and thereby avoids these objections. Three main takeaways of the paper are: (i) the origin of money is not essential (...) to its nature; (ii) some commodities, including some forms of money, are immaterial continuants and should not be conflated with services; and (iii) the claim or credit theory of money, insofar as it solves the problem of the double coincidence of wants, ultimately collapses into a version of the commodity theory of money. (shrink)

The book develops a comprehensive and measured case that bitcoin is a net benefit to the world, despite its imperfections. Resistance Money is intended for all, from the clueless to the specialist, from the proponent to the die-hard skeptic, and everyone in between.

The current economic and societal production system gives money a magnified importance, overlooking other essential flows necessary for human survival and existence. It focuses on monetary indicators like profits, dividends, and GDPs to evaluate organizational production, while often disregarding outputs that harm the biosphere. Money is treated as the constitutive being (ousia) and attributed undemonstrated explanatory properties. Intangible flow theory helps eliminate this metaphysical status of money by recognizing that monetary flows are just one of many necessary flows for human (...) survival and existence. Organizations deliver product-flows that require input-flows from and send output-flows back to the encompassing biosphere, whether they explicitly engage in environmentally friendly activities or not. Therefore, every organization is an ecological entity because it has a relationship with the biosphere, which participates in the manner through which humans integrate into their surrounding environment and relate to other living beings. Eliminating the metaphysical status of money integrates every organization in the biosphere, making organizations accountable for environmental harm caused by their activities. This can be achieved by deconstructing the metaphysical status of money in business models. (shrink)

Modern macroeconomics owes much to the ideas of Keynes. Yet Keynes was a fantast whose highest ideals centered around a contemplative hedonistic life. His interest in economics was due to his desire to _abolish_ the economy and the active virtues, especially prudence and courage and their social counterparts. As soon as this "religion" is rejected, Keynes' theories are exploded. Part I of this book refutes General Theory and presents a vision of the market process, entrepreneurship, employment, interest, money, and the (...) business cycle. Part II examines textbook Keynesianism, IS-LM, alternative theories of business cycles, and related issues. Summa is a definitive demolition of the Keynesian school and should be grappled with by all economists. (shrink)

The following overview focuses on Simmels "analytical" exploration of money, i.e. on his treatment of the conceptual structure of monetary measurement, on his social ontology of money, and on his reflections regarding the potential impact of money on our conceptualization of abstract notions in general. The analysis provided in his Philosophy of Money entails a thorough conceptualization of the philosophical foundations supporting economic, legal, and sociological models of money evolving at the time. Simultaneously, Simmel uses this analysis as the point (...) of departure for a more general analysis of distinct changes to modern culture and society. (shrink)

This essay introduces the Part III of _The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money, Vol. 2_.

G. E. M. Anscombe gave a lecture in 1970 on the shift in attitudes toward usury between medieval and modern times. Over the course of this lecture she says a great deal about the ontology of money. Although she seems less than completely aware of the fact, her discussion marks the difference between a Roman conception of money, according to which money’s proper use destroys it, and Marx’s analysis of capitalist money, which, like a cancer, can grow endlessly. I analyze (...) this discussion of money, identify some of its shortcomings, and connect Anscombe’s lecture to earlier, more familiar strands in her thought. (shrink)

John Searle has proposed one of the most influential contemporary accounts of social ontology. According to Searle, institutional facts are created by the collective assignment of a specific kind of function —status-function— to pre-existing objects. Thus, a piece of paper counts as money in a certain context because people collectively recognize it as money, and impose a status upon it, which in turn enables that piece of paper to deliver certain functions (means of payment, etc.). The first part of this (...) essay presents Searle’s theory of social ontology and summarizes his views on money. The second part centers on criticisms of his views and compares his theory with its main competitors, including the theories of Tuomela, Guala and Hindriks, and Smit, Buekens and Duplessis. The conclusion attempts to see what may remain of Searle’s theory after careful examination. (shrink)

To this day, many theorists regard the commodity theory and the credit theory as the two main rival accounts of the nature of money. Yet cryptocurrency has revolutionized the institution of money in ways that most commodity and credit theorists could hardly have anticipated. Given that cryptocurrency is a new form of money, the question arises whether the commodity and credit theories can adequately account for it. I argue that they cannot. I first offer an interpretation of the commodity and (...) credit theories according to which these theories uphold differing claims about the origin of money, the ontology of money, and the function of money. I then argue that thus understood, neither theory can accommodate cryptocurrency. Finally, I develop a novel hybrid hylomorphic account of money which draws on aspects of both the commodity and credit theories, and I argue that this hybrid account can accommodate cryptocurrency. (shrink)

Paul Krugman and others deny that bitcoin has legitimate uses. Critics like Krugman also fail to distinguish bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. But once we isolate bitcoin from the rest of the field, we see how special, and how useful, it is. In this chapter, we explain why bitcoin is unique among cryptocurrencies as a credibly neutral monetary asset and why this is important. Its uniqueness doesn’t owe entirely to its age (as the oldest) or market ranking (as the most valuable). (...) As a credibly neutral monetary asset, bitcoin solves problems for those in less than ideal circumstances. And beyond bitcoin’s functionality, its origin and surrounding culture also help to explain why people trust bitcoin more than any other cryptocurrency to solve these problems. Nothing else comes close. This gap between bitcoin and everything else has implications for policy-making, journalism, and academic research. (shrink)

Alternative currencies are means of payment that circulate alongside—as an alternative or complement to—official currencies. While these currencies have existed for a long time, both society and academia have shown a renewed interest in their potential to decentralize the governance of monetary affairs and to bring people and organizations together in more ethical or sustainable ways. This article is a review of the ethical and philosophical implications of these alternative monetary projects. We first discuss various classifications of these currencies before (...) analyzing the ethical challenges linked to the way they tackle social and environmental issues. We also examine the incentive-based and coercive mechanisms used by these currencies from an ethical perspective and debate the promises and perils of monetary decentralization and democracy. We conclude by identifying an agenda for future research. (shrink)

The article provides a critical assessment of The Central Bank of the Russian Federation policy in response to the sanctions of the US, the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea and a number of other countries. The effect of sanctions on the Russian economy and its financial market is viewed through the prism of credit, interest rate, and currency risk, and the risk of a decline in business activity. Special attention is paid to the inflationary component and inflationary expectations (...) of the Russian Federation, as well as to the forecasts for a decline in business activity in Russia. A critical assessment is given to the actions of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation and the economic bloc of the government of the Russian Federation as a whole in response to the sanctions of the civilized world, which disable the normal existence of the economy and the main purpose of which is not to destroy the economy of the Russian Federation but to ensure the end of hostilities on the European continent. The results of our study will be useful to everyone who studies the problems of the effect of economic sanctions on the resource-based economy and the processes of stimulating political decisions by economic methods. (shrink)

In the bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi Nakamoto (2008: 2) defines an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures. Many have since defined a bitcoin as a chain of digital signatures. This latter definition continues to appear in reports from central banks, advocacy centers, and governments, as well as in academic papers across the disciplines of law, economics, computer science, cryptography, management, and philosophy. Some have even used it to argue that what we now call bitcoin is not the real bitcoin. (...) The definition fails, however. This is important because the Chain Definition obscures Satoshi’s solution to a dilemma in the design of electronic cash, as well as the truth about bitcoin’s privacy and fungibility. In this article, I explain why the Chain Definition fails and what Satoshi likely endorsed instead. Along the way, I untangle some issues around bitcoin fungibility and clarify some others around the ontology of digital assets. (shrink)

The traditional Lockean justification of property rights has been argued to be no longer valid in a world in which much wealth does not derive from acquisitions of natural resources, and in which much property, such as money, is intangible. This means that libertarians need to reconsider whether and why property rights are justified for objects that fall outside of the scope of the Lockean justification. This paper gives a justification of property rights in relation to modern money, which uses (...) the self-ownership principle as its central premise. Since modern money is a form of credit, I start with a justification of credit property rights. I then consider both money under gold convertibility and present-day fiat systems, showing that the justification of credit property rights remains valid under these conditions. (shrink)

In this article, we identify three key design dimensions along which cryptocurrencies differ -- privacy, censorship-resistance, and consensus procedure. Each raises important normative issues. Our discussion uncovers new ways to approach the question of whether Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies should be used as money, and new avenues for developing a positive answer to that question. A guiding theme is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results of disciplines like computer science and (...) economics. Note: this article is the second entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency. (shrink)

In this article, we describe what cryptocurrency is, how it works, and how it relates to familiar conceptions of and questions about money. We then show how normative questions about monetary policy find new expression in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. These questions can play a role in addressing not just what money is, but what it should be. A guiding theme in our discussion is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results (...) of disciplines like computer science and economics. (shrink)

In spite of their materialist aspirations, both classical and neoclassical economic theories rely on non-material notions of value to explain market activity. André Orléan calls this commitment of orthodox economics "the substance hypothesis." In this essay, I show how the substance hypothesis mirrors Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's account of monads, which he called the "true atoms of nature." I argue that value is the atom of economic nature in orthodox economic theories. Like monads, it is a fantasy. The atom of economic (...) nature that governs our actual, material lives, I argue, is money. (shrink)

We argue that the ethical case for instituting vaccine benefit programs is justified by 2 widely recognized values: (1) reducing overall harm from COVID-19 and (2) protecting disadvantaged individuals. We then explain why they do not coerce, exploit, wrongfully distort decision-making, corrupt vaccination's moral significance, wrong those who have already been vaccinated, or destroy willingness to become vaccinated. However, their cost impacts and their effects on public perception of vaccines should be evaluated.

The article presents an analysis of global trends in setting the inflation target and the acceptable corridor of inflation target fluctuations. Inflation targeting is an important attribute of the monetary regime of inflation targeting, its main quantitative parameter. The tendency of the inflation targeting regime in 70 countries all over the world are considered, of which 41 countries have official recognition by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regarding the inflation targeting regime. It was found that most countries set the inflation (...) target at 5% or below, and the level of the corridor of fluctuations in relative terms hovers around 20-50% of the target value. The latest trends related to changes in the monetary policy of the European Central Bank have been studied, recommendations for determining the acceptable corridor of fluctuations of the inflation target in small and open economies on the example of Ukraine are provided. (shrink)

In the given article the problems of choice as for the types and forms of debt and share financing on the developing and “frontier markets” with high interest rates have been considered, the definition of what kind of interest rates can be viewed as high and under which circumstances nominal interest rate and in which ones – the real interest rate is important for business. Also, the classification of debt and sharing financing is given and the comparative analysis of such (...) financing is made. Some close attention has been paid to the calculation of the real interest rate according to the inflation forecast. Recommendations concerning attracting of relatively cheap trade financing including international financial and credit organizations, development of operation factoring, financing from captive financial institutions of the exporters of the materials and equipment from the EU and the US have been grounded. The opportunity of relatively free of charge share financing through the mechanism of placing shares IPO/SPO is emphasized, exemplified by the results of placing shares on stock exchanges and their alternative platforms of issuing banks with businesses in Ukraine in 2005 – 2013. As a result, the conclusion concerning the necessity of thorough analysis of financial conditions on the developing and frontier markets before gaining such financing has been made. High interest rates within the average indicators even on the basis of prime rates do not necessarily mean absence of attractive conditions of financing. (shrink)

Money can take many forms—a coin or a bill, a payment for an automobile or a prize for an award, a piece from the 1989 series or the 2019 series, and so on—but despite this, money is designed to represent an amount and only that. Thus, a dollar is a dollar, in the sense that money is fungible. But when adults ordinarily think about money, they think about it in terms of its source, and in particular, its moral source (e.g., (...) dirty money). Here we investigate the development of the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. We study children ages 5–6 and 8–9, who are sensitive to both object history and morality, and thus possess the component pieces needed to think that a dollar may not be like any other. Across three principal studies (and three additional studies in Appendix S1; N = 327; 219 five‐ and six‐year‐olds; 108 eight‐ and nine‐year‐olds), we find that children are less likely to want money with negative moral history, a pattern that was stronger and more consistent among 8‐ and 9‐year‐olds than 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds. These findings highlight pressing directions for future research that could help shed light on the mechanisms that contribute to the belief that money carries traces of its moral history. (shrink)

Purpose: To develop proposals on the directions of institutional support for the processes of creativity of the Ukrainian economy. Design/methodology/approach: The analysis of trends in the creativity of the Ukrainian economy is carried out and proposals are developed for conceptualizing institutional support for these processes. The authors set out to develop proposals for institutional support for creativity processes and offer recommendations for systematic updating of Ukrainian legislation in the areas of state regulation of high-tech business. The information base was the (...) information materials of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine, the statistical databases of the European Commission, OECD and World Bank for the period 2014–2020. The research methodology is based on scientific tools that include comparative analysis and economic and mathematical modeling. Findings: Building a national program of public investment in creative development will allow us to systematically approach the issue of institutional support for technological breakthroughs. Research limitations/implications: Recommendations on the development and improvement of legislative instruments of deregulatory policy, harmonization with European standards are substantiated. Directions of systematic updating of legislation on guaranteeing foreign investment of creative projects and targeted investment of joint research projects of academic science and creative organizations are proposed. The implementation will allow a systematic approach to the issue of institutional support for the technological breakthrough of Ukraine. Originality/value: There is a need to step up institutional activities in the field of organizing research centers, introduce targeted investment in the academic science and research activity of creative organizations. (shrink)

В публикации рассматриваются особенности функционирования банков развития. Проанализированы мнения ученых по поводу деятельности банков развития и их влияния на экономическое развитие страны. Определены основные цели банков развития. Обоснованы отличия между банками развития и коммерческими банками. Рассмотрены особенности деятельности Банка развития Республики Беларусь. Исследованы мнения отечественных ученых по поводу необходимости создания банка развития в Украине. Проанализированы проблемы функционирования Украинского банка реконструкции и развития, а также Всеукраинского банка развития. Предложены основные направления создания государственного банка развития в Украине.

The advent of virtual currencies such as bitcoin raises a pressing question for lawmakers, regulators, and judges: should bitcoin and other virtual currencies be classified as money or currency for legal and regulatory purposes? I examine two different approaches to answering this question—a descriptive approach and a normative approach. The descriptive approach says that bitcoin and other virtual currencies should be classified as money or currency just in case they really are money or currency, whereas the normative approach says that (...) this question of classification should be answered on the basis of substantive normative considerations. I argue against the descriptive approach and in favor of the normative approach. (shrink)

The article develops a psychoanalytic theory of antisemitism as a specific form of paranoia rooted in an unresolved conflict under late-capitalist conditions. Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" and on clinical case studies, it argues that antisemitic patients project incompatible demands of inhibition and disinhibition onto “the Jew,” who becomes a paradoxical imago uniting moral law and forbidden desire. This projection both externalises intrapsychic conflict and offers a fantasy of its harmonious resolution, which then fuels alternating movements of (...) idealising identification and murderous hatred. The article links these dynamics to the contradictory social meanings of money as both limitless gratification and coercive capitalist power, suggesting that modern society structurally fosters the very ambivalence antisemitism seeks to deny. Antisemites thus “love the delusion as themselves,” preferring paranoid resolution to tolerating psychic and social contradiction. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the structure of monetary denominations of economic value. Marx and Simmel analyze this structure by means of references to objects of mere catallactic validity. These objects are ontologically atypical insofar as they are particulars of the genus commodity. Understanding money through generic particulars elucidates the conceptual link between money as a unit of account and money as a means of payment. This initially perplexing idea captures a fundamental characteristic of money without committing to either a (...) commodity theory or a claim theory of money. A modification of the notion ‘commodity’ allows for a conception of money as a generic particular that is consistent with contemporary accounts of money as abstract purchasing power residing in different forms of liabilities and claims denominated in a common quantitative scale. (shrink)

Although the theological elements of Robert Boyle’s mechanical philosophy have received careful scrutiny, his reflections on economic issues have largely been overlooked. This article takes a small step towards redressing this state of affairs. Rather than argue that Boyle – like John Locke or David Hume – was as interested in political economy as he was in discovering the nature of Nature, the article treats him as a point of entry for considering how early-modern England negotiated the revolutionary cultural and (...) economic changes that emerged as capitalism took command. More specifically, it uses one of Boyle’s less-famous inventions – a hydrostatic device for discriminating between real, degraded and counterfeit coinage – in order to explore how economic exchange began to acquire a patina of ‘objectivity’ in the 17th-century imagination. (shrink)

Naturalism is still facing a strong opposition in the philosophy of social science from influential scholars who argue that philosophical analysis must be autonomous from scientific investigation. The opposition exploits philosophers’ traditional diffidence toward social science and fuels the ambition to provide new foundations for social research. A classic anti-naturalist strategy is to identify a feature of social reality that prevents scientific explanation and prediction. An all-time favorite is the dependence of social phenomena on human representation. This article examines two (...) prominent versions of the dependence thesis and concludes that they both fail. Contemporary social science is capable of accounting for the causal dependence of social reality on representation, and there is no reason to believe that social entities are ontologically dependent on the collective acceptance of a constitutive rule. (shrink)

Money is everywhere in science. Yet historians have only rarely placed the money trail at the center of their analyses. The essays in this Focus section demonstrate that following the money offers a historiographical path for investigating a number of key issues across disciplinary boundaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on cases and materials relating to a number of scientific fields, including electrical engineering, aeronautics, agriculture, and paleontology, the essays examine the continuous role of money in industrial and (...) military patronage, personal connections and networks, and spatial and geographical dimensions of science, as well as in relation to state funding and ownership. Together, the contributions demonstrate how following the money offers a way of overcoming hyperprofessionalism in the history of science. (shrink)

Whenever debt is itself money, this money becomes a self-inflating debt principal by already being its own interest. Hence modern inflation, deflation, and eventual monetary crises. Yet why does money become debt? The concept of representational monetary identity answers to precisely this question.

Galiani discusses a subject much debated in the eighteenth century, namely, the nature of the currency. He also includes considerations of economic theory and political philosophy around the main motif. He supports the following theses of monetary theory: currency has the function of a sort of register of credits that every individual can have towards the warehouses of goods of which the society is supplied, and precisely in the measure of the contribution he has given to their supply; the metallic (...) currency has the merit, with respect to a hypothetical system of artificial accounting, to be safe from frauds and not to require a bureaucratic apparatus; the value of currency depends on the value of metals, not on legislative interventions. (shrink)

The persistent tension between wealth accumulation and moral regulation across civilizations has typically been interpreted as a conflict between economic rationality and ethical ideals. This paper advances a different account. It argues that monetary systems arise as stabilization mechanisms for amplified acquisitive conflict under civilizational scale, while religious traditions emerge as alignment-recovery responses to the relational detachment such systems generate. Human acquisitiveness is not a pathological deviation but a baseline feature of embodied survival. However, abstraction, comparison, and symbolic retention detach (...) acquisition from need, transforming finite greed into a structurally unbounded force. Money stabilizes this amplification by resolving disputes over contribution and distribution through differential symbolic retention, thereby enabling large-scale cooperation. Yet this stabilization simultaneously decouples accumulation from recognition and feedback, insulating acquisitive harm and permitting persistent inequality. Across cultures, religions recurrently develop practices that restore relational grounding—interest prohibitions, redistribution mandates, anti-hoarding norms, and obligations toward the poor—re-embedding dependency and vulnerability within abstract economic systems. These recovery mechanisms, however, erode as monetary mediation deepens, producing recurring cycles of stabilization, detachment, restoration, and erosion. Integrating economic, moral, and religious domains within a unified Structural Alignment framework, the paper interprets religion not as economic ideology or social cohesion mechanism, but as symbolic alignment recovery within monetary civilizations whose stabilizing architecture permits detachment. (shrink)

This essay takes a famous anecdote from Roman antiquity, the emperor Vespasian's defence of his tax on urine with the remark Pecunia non olet ("money does not smell"), as the starting point for a philosophical question about the moral status of money: does money carry the moral residue of its origin, or is it, as a medium of exchange, genuinely indifferent to where it comes from? The essay distinguishes two layers in our relationship with money. At the level of exchange, (...) money is fungible and origin-blind, and in this sense Vespasian was right. At the level of conscience, law, and culture, however, the source of money continues to matter, and people persistently treat some money as "tainted". Drawing on Viviana Zelizer's account of the social earmarking of money, the psychoanalytic association of money with impurity in Freud and Ferenczi, Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, and Georg Simmel's reflections on the levelling indifference of money, the essay argues that the fungibility thesis is a mathematical truth that human moral psychology refuses to honour. It concludes that the odourlessness of money is a physical fact, while our sensitivity to its origin is a moral one, and that this sensitivity is part of what keeps moral life intact. The piece is written as a reflective, interdisciplinary essay accessible to a general readership rather than as a peer-reviewed research article. (shrink)