CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Raikkonen, Jooseppi |
|---|---|
| Title | Credit Where Credit is Due: The Credit Theory of Money as a Claim about Constitutive Social Construction |
| Summary | This thesis puts forward an interpretation of the “credit theory” of money as a theory of its “constitutive social construction”. Credit theory often goes against a popular, though historically uncorroborated story of money’s origins in barter, and claims that this false origin story is illustrative of a remarkable depoliticization of money’s nature. Instead of being a simple commodity, the credit theorists say that money is a unit of account for debt and credit relations. The thesis offers a framework for understanding why claims about the “social construction” of even clearly social objects like money can be informative, and then goes onto use this insight to contrast two ways of understanding the social world: the game-theoretic and the Searlean. Finally, it is shown that the Searlean theory of social ontology is more suited to capturing the distinctive claims of the credit theory of money. This is because the credit theorists emphasise that money is, at base, an abstract agreement about how to track value embedded in debts and credits, not a commodity. Such an object could not arise from subjective preferences but requires the setting up of practices through acts of collective intentionality. |
| Supervisor | Passinsky, Asya |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/raikkonen_jooseppi.pdf |
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