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The Specificity of Money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2007

Geoffrey Ingham
Affiliation:
Christ's College and Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge [gki1000@cam.ac.uk].
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Extract

In “Laundering ‘money’: on the need for conceptual clarity within the sociology of money”, (Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XLVI, 3 (2005), pp. 387–411, Nigel Dodd tells us that recent work has added further complications to an existing “conceptual muddle” in the sociology of money, and advances a claim to have made matters clearer (Dodd 2005a). The “muddle” is identified in the work of Cohen (2004), Hart (2000), Zelizer (1994, 2000), and in my own book The Nature of Money (Ingham 2004). In the same year, Dodd advanced the same critique – at times verbatim, in Economy and Society (Dodd 2005b), where, subsequently, I responded to what I take to be the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my work (Ingham 2006). Here, I will briefly reiterate these objections, focusing mainly on the uncertainty, ambiguity, and consequent incoherence, of Dodd's attempt to identify the specific nature of money. On the one hand, he asserts that “any attempt to build a coherent theoretical conception of money is bound to fail” (p. 387). But, on the other, Dodd also argues that that “greater conceptual clarity can be brought to bear” by making a distinction between the monetary medium and money's denomination (p. 406). Leaving aside for a moment the fact that such a distinction has been commonplace in monetary theory at least since Plato and Aristotle (see Schumpeter 1994 [1954]), Dodd appears to be unsure, on rather curious intellectual grounds, about the usefulness of his claim to have provided conceptual clarity.

Type
Debate on money
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 2007

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