On Simmel's Pure Concept of Money: A Response to Ingham

Extract

In “Laundering ‘Money’: On the Need for Conceptual Clarity within the Sociology of Money”, I explored the conceptual ramifications of recent developments in the sociology of money. These developments corresponded to what appear to be two countervailing trends in the world of money: homogenisation and diversification. The second trend, particularly, raises important conceptual questions about how money should be defined, and I sought to address these through an analysis of the work of prominent monetary scholars such as Cohen, Hart, Ingham and Zelizer. My central aim was to bring greater clarity to a field – the sociology of money – lacking a commonly agreed definition of its core object of study, namely money. The article was motivated by an underlying sense that these scholars were talking past each other. One significant reason seemed to be that two terms that should be central to a meaningful engagement among leading sociologists of money – money and currency – were being used in different and incompatible ways. This was the “conceptual confusion” I referred to: not a confusion specific to any individual monetary scholar, but rather a confusion bound to arise from any comparison of their work. I aimed to propose a conceptual framework wherein their different analyses could be more usefully compared (2). Of these scholars, both Hart (3) and Zelizer have constructively responded to my proposals without, of course, agreeing with them all.