Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt

Hadrien Saiag (1)

1 IIAC - Institut interdisciplinaire d'anthropologie du contemporain

The paper aims to reconsider Polanyi's approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses (1968) is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in his Great Transformation (2001 [1944]). However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from account is weak; and, most important, he ultimately makes an incomplete break with the classical real/monetary dichotomy. This paper proposes a distinction between money as a set of instruments and practices and money as a concept, through the integration of John Commons' concept of debt into Polanyi's framework. This reformulation allows us to resolve Polanyi's unresolved questions while preserving his major contributions, and leads to a more complex understanding of money.

Mots clés: Karl Polanyi; theories of money; debt; money plurality; economic anthropology; John Commons

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie; Economies et finances; Sociologie

Hadrien Saiag. Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt. Economy and Society, 2014, 43 (4), pp.559-581. ⟨10.1080/03085147.2014.898825⟩. ⟨halshs-02343433⟩