What is currency?
The answer to this simple question can be extraordinarily complex.
If you ask your banking advisor (if you still have one), it's a safe bet that he or she won't know the answer.
Used on a daily basis, the fuel of commercial societies, money is however not a fixed institutional object, governed by immutable rules.
This is what the economist Jézabel Couppey-Soubeyran, the sociologist Pierre Delandre and the philosopher Augustin Sersiron
demonstrate in a scholarly, but very didactic, volume,
The Power of Money .
Thesis of their work: our current currency is no longer adapted to the issues of the moment - the climate challenge - and must be reformed to respond to them.
The barter of primitive communities, the animal skins, cocoa beans or pearl necklaces of the first exchanges were replaced by metal coins minted by ancient empires, the first means of payment in their own right.
At the end of the Middle Ages appear…
This article is reserved for subscribers.
You have 69% left to discover.
Flash sale
Unlock all items immediately.
I ENJOY IT
Already subscribed?
Log in