Social positioning theory as social ontology of a hierarchy of money

The nature of money is within the discipline of economics typically analysed merely by way of listing its functions grounded in properties of money things. But the discourse has recently more explicitly turned to addressing this foundational question of “What is money?” from the perspective of social ontology that sees money as a social phenomenon. We argue that any such venture should be able to account for the hierarchical structure of money. This argument integrates three distinct aspects of money i.) that in any community there is usually not one but multiple kinds of money; ii.) that these monies are of different qualities and therefore are structured within a hierarchy, and iii.) that these qualitative differences that distinguish individual kinds of money ultimately pertain to the rights and obligations that define each form of money. Building on recent debates about the hierarchy of money in economics—particularly The Money View and Modern Money Theory—this paper seeks to extend these discussions into the domain of social ontology, using the framework of social positioning developed by the Cambridge Social Ontology Group.