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On money as a conventional sign: revisiting Aristotle's conception of money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2020

Ricardo F. Crespo Open the ORCID record for Ricardo F. Crespo [Opens in a new window]
Ricardo F. Crespo*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, IAE (Universidad Austral) and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Argentina's National Scientific and Technical Research Council), Pilar, Argentina
*
Corresponding author. Email: rcrespo@iae.edu.ar
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Abstract

Regardless of the historical evolution of money, some passages of Aristotle's works shed light on its meaning and nature. This paper will attentively consider these passages. The first section presents Aristotle's thoughts on money. While the second section analyses money as a unit of measurement, the third section deals with its conventional nature, and the fourth draws from the theories of signs elaborated by John Poinsot and Charles Peirce to expand the explanation of the nature of money as a sign. The conclusion considers three levels of consideration of money based on Aristotle's thoughts: (1) universal abstract money, (2) instantiated in specific currencies, and (3) the actualization of their properties and potentialities in actual economic dealings.

Keywords

Aristotlemoney as a conventional signnature of money
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Institutional Economics , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , June 2021 , pp. 459 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © Millennium Economics Ltd 2020

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Footnotes

This work has benefitted from comments by John Davis, Julián Giglio, Wade Hands, Rodrigo Laera, Carlo Natali, Fernando Tohmé, Eduardo Scarano, Alejandro Vigo, and three anonymous referees. The usual disclaimer applies.

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