Pre-1900 Utopian Visions of the ‘Cashless Society’

Abstract

Historically, one of the most prominent mediums through which new ideas about monetary systems have been presented and debated is the utopian treatise. That this was the case is, in many ways, not surprising since one of the core attractions of utopias is that they offerto both readers and writers -discursive spaces, free from the clutter and constraints of the present, within which alternate (improved) social and political systems can be laid out and analysed in their totality.1 As such, they provided a means through which thinkers of all political persuasions could articulate their thoughts and ideas as to how to overcome the various practical and ethical problems associated with money. Although a great many of the 2 forecasts for the future of money that were put forwards in this way had distinctly socialist undertones and were closely tied--in with the wider goals of alleviating poverty and social dislocation, this did not mean that the practical problems involved in actually establishing alternate monetary systems were not considered in--depth. 2 Indeed, the issue of whether or not there was a better alternative to conventional cash (or, indeed, if society could operate without it) was one that attracted a great deal of attention and continued to vex utopian thinkers right up until the twenty first century. 3

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