ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the method of historical institutionalism with respect to money. Money is often treated as a natural substance whose role in human institutions merely evolved due to convenience. Money is the symbolic representation of the whole, while also considered to be individual private property. Debt was a collective commitment, and the mobilization of the community was an essential aspect in demonstrating creditworthiness. The typical form of knowledge also varied historically with forms of the state and credit. Building on the type of abstraction unique to capitalism, the liberal state is based on property, with two forms of representation: political quantitative representation in formal governance institutions; and the abstract representation of labor and property in the form of money. One of the contradictions of liberalism is the apparent mutual consistency with freedom and constraint, most famously during the eighteenth-century slave trade. The methodology proposed in the chapter is a long-term institutional history of money and the state.
