Filozofija i drustvo 2023 Volume 34, Issue 2, Pages: 273-288
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2302273P
Full text ( 321 KB)
Credit, debt and money as social institutions of trust
Perunović Andrea (University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory), andrea.perunovic@ifdt.bg.ac.rs
While the notions of credit, debt and money are today almost exclusively
associated with economic discourse, their semantic fields prove to be
significantly wider and more complex. This article seeks to restore the
repressed meanings of these three notions. Its aim consists of a
deconstruction of the dominant economic narratives on credit, debt, money
and trust, that would show that these concepts should be primarily
considered as social, rather than solely economic institutions. Therefore,
in the introduction we will look at the etymology of the word credit and
disclose its semantic proximity with magic as a social practice.
Furthermore, the first section will examine the intrinsic relation between
debt and credit, departing from Marcel Hénaff’s three types of symbolic debt
and exposing how these shape the financial credit in neoliberal capitalism
and install the creditor-debtor relation (such as Maurizio Lazzarato
describes it) as predominant at all levels of society. The second section
shows how relations of credit and debt crystallize in the notion of money:
firstly by exposing some major historical and anthropological insights about
money; moreover, by considering money from an onto-axiological point of view
as the knot in which all social relations of trust culminate; and finally,
by relating the three different types of trust in money, proposed by French
heterodox economists Michel Aglietta and André Orléan, to the three forms of
symbolic debt, thus showing how credit, debt and money are fundamentally
anchored in social relations.
Keywords: credit, debt, money, trust, society, capitalism
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