ABSTRACT
Recent historical works have stressed the relevance of Hayekian suggestions to analyse the co-ordination patterns of market economies (Aimar 1999; Bianchi 1994; Garretsen 1994; Kirzner 1997). Simultaneously, standard views on market co-ordination have largely been influenced by the renewed interpretation of Mengerian theory of money. Over several decades, under different circumstances, Menger has repeatedly exposed his genetic conception of the ‘origin of money’ (Menger 1985, 1994, 1963, 1892a, 1892b). A few years after the first edition of Jevons’ Theory of Political Economy, but without explicit reference to Jevonian developments on barter and monetary exchange, he then provides a long-lived solution for the problem of the ‘double coincidence of wants’. His nowadays wellknown methodology (see Aimar 1996; Arena and Gloria 1997; Hodgson 1992; O’Driscoll 1986), consists in focusing on the self-reinforcing process of emergence of money from the set of commodities, according to its initial properties of marketability:
Men have been led, . . . , each by his own economic interests, without convention, without legal compulsion, nay, even without any regard to the common interest, to exchange goods destined for exchange for other goods equally destined for exchange, but more saleable.
