Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt

Abstract

This paper aims to reconsider Polanyi's approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in his The great transformation. However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from account is weak; and, most important, he ultimately makes an incomplete break with the classical real/monetary dichotomy. This paper proposes a distinction between money as a set of instruments and practices and money as a concept, through the integration of John Commons's concept of debt into Polanyi's framework. This reformulation allows us to resolve Polanyi's unresolved questions while preserving his major contributions, and leads to a more complex understanding of money.

Intersections. Eejsp_vol2_no2

“…This view of money in market society differs from that of The Great Transformation that treats money as an historically specific institution in modern societies that has social and political functions and cannot be conceptualized as a universal means of exchange (Saiag, 2014). I agree with Holmes (2014) that we need to follow the logic of The Great Transformation and adhere to the special purpose view of money.…”

“…However, most of these works have concentrated on his later writings and mainly took Polanyi's article The semantics of money uses as point of reference (Polanyi, 1971). As Saiag (2014) shows, The Great Transformation differs from his later writings on money in several dimensions, but most importantly, in its analysis of money as part of the historical process of the rise and fall of the fiction of free markets and fictitious commodification. More recently, several leading post-Marxist scholars (Evans, 2008;Munck, 2004).…”

Money as a social relation beyond the state: a contribution to the institutionalist approach based on the Argentinian trueque

“…Instruments used to carry out transactions in the trueque may differ from what is conventionally understood as money. To conceive them as such, it is necessary to distinguish between money as a concept and monetary practices and instruments: as an abstract system of evaluation and settlement of debt, money is defined by its ‘generic properties’ of account and settlement (Ingham : 124; Théret : 819–823), while instruments and practices are said to be ‘monetary’ when they allow debt to be evaluated and settled in concrete transactions (Blanc – see also Saiag ). By so doing, it is possible to label transactions that would otherwise be considered in kind as ‘monetary’.…”

Sustaining Democracy in an Era of Free Markets: Karl Polanyi’s Perspectives on the Politics of Finance

“…However, most of these works have concentrated on his later writings and mainly took Polanyi's article The semantics of money uses as point of reference (Polanyi, 1971). As Saiag (2014) shows, The Great Transformation differs from his later writings on money in several dimensions, but most importantly, in its analysis of money as part of the historical process of the rise and fall of the fiction of free markets and fictitious commodification. More recently, several leading post-Marxist scholars SCHEIRING, G.: SUSTAINING DEMOCRACY IN THE ERA OF DEPENDENT FINANCIALIZATION: KARL POLANYI'S PERSPECTIVES ON THE POLITICS OF FINANCE 86 have tried to revive Polanyi's theories to reconstruct critical theory.…”