Monay as language[Essai sur la monnaie comme langage]

This essay takes seriously the commonplace idea that money is the language of economics. A critical examination of what the scholarly political economy of money can shed light on this notion. The nominal nature of money has not been taken into account by theories of value that presuppose only goods—real analysis—nor its corollary, namely that wealth in our societies is a nominal magnitude. An ancient tradition, called monetary analysis or nominal analysis, has made money its fundamental postulate. It is exemplified in the modern era by Keynes and deserves to be rehabilitated. The fact that money is nominal and that payments record nominal quantities in accounting suggests the hypothesis that it is part of human language. This is what is demonstrated in this essay, with the immediate and important consequence that rehabilitated nominal analysis finds itself quite naturally inserted into the social sciences. Multidisciplinarity finds a transdisciplinary theoretical foundation in the thesis that money is one of the many manifestations of the unique capacity of the human species. Certain consequences are drawn from this new paradigm concerning both the "imaginary institution of society" and the way in which we can conceive of the relationships our societies maintain with their environment.