Agreement is money: Beyond the chartalist reading of Adam Smith

This article shows that Adam Smith is the precursor of neither the orthodox nor the heterodox view of money, as has been doubly argued. According to him, money arose neither as a medium of exchange introduced to overcome the difficulties of barter, as in the orthodox view, nor as a unit of account established by the state, as in the heterodox view. On the contrary, as this article shows, for him money arises from that agreement on the valuation of mutual services that originally takes place in exchange. Money, thus, emerges spontaneously in exchange, but, contrary to the orthodox view, it emerges primarily as a measure of value. At the same time, if the state can intervene to guarantee the universality of a means of payment to settle claims and debts, for Smith this is only the fruit of the historical process and not its beginning, as in the heterodox view.