Non aes sed fides. Réflexions sur le pouvoir de la monnaie

The institutionalist approach is based on the thesis that money is the result of a collective process of election through which a community of commodity producers constructs its cohesion by creating a shared representation of value, namely the unit of account. This conception of money as a community fact is opposed to both the instrumentalist conception, defended by neoclassical theory, according to which money is a simple technical means of facilitating exchange, and the chartalist approach, according to which money is a creature of the state. In the institutionalist perspective, money derives its authority from the confidence of the group that elected it. Because of the collective investment of which it is the object, monetary belief is endowed with an autonomous power that the State does not control and that imposes itself on it. A part of monetary confidence – which we call "ethical confidence" – has at stake the values that the monetary institution defends. This is what the example of bitcoin shows. Indeed, the very idea of a digital currency free of any central institution was developed within the "crypto-anarchist" movement, with the explicit aim of proposing an institutional architecture of exchange that is fully in line with the values and ideological requirements of this movement.