Reinventing monies in Europe

Abstract

This paper offers much-needed analytical refinement to the sociology of money. I argue that we need to develop a conceptual vocabulary that enables us to take account of two apparently conflicting trends in the world's money flows. While state-issued 'currency' is undergoing a process of homogenization, 'money' in a generic sense is diversifying through the rapid growth of new monetary forms. I move on to suggest that all forms of money (some currencies, others not) should be regarded as dual: as monies of account and as monetary media . This dualism sheds new light on a monetary form that sociologists have either ignored or misunderstood, namely the euro. It enables us to conceive of the euro as a highly unorthodox, or hybrid, currency. Moreover, it suggests that, by virtue of this unorthodoxy, the euro zone represents a special case of currency homogenization that may actually stimulate monetary diversification.

The Transformation of Morals in Markets: Death, Benefits, and the Exchange of Life Insurance Policies

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“…The "social studies of money" literature has flourished in recent years. It spans sociology (Dodd 2014;Ganßmann 2012;Ingham 2004;Zelizer 1994), economics (Bell 2001;Wray 2012), law (Desan 2014), history (Spang 2015), political economy (Knafo 2013;Konings 2015), literary studies (Poovey 2008), anthropology (Graeber 2011;Maurer et al 2013), and philosophy (Bjerg 2014;Yuran 2014). One way to cut through the bewildering variety of overlapping and recurring debates is to distinguish between a social-philosophical and a political-economic approach to money.…”

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