Economists bear particular responsibility when it comes to money. More often than not, the other specialists of the human and social sciences, not just historians of trade and finance but numismatists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, semiologists, political scientists, jurists and so...

This book endeavours to throw light on the phenomenon of money in general in an essentially comparative and therefore concrete way and not from a universalist, dogmatic and abstract standpoint. To do this, it apprehends monetary relations within the particular society to which they belong.

When analysing any social phenomenon, encounters among different social science disciplines and fields of investigation dispersed over time and space may well produce illusory rapprochements. Such encounters nevertheless have great potential for producing truly common knowledge. In matters of...