ABSTRACT

Notwithstanding the revealed monetary and financial characteristics of modern capitalist societies’ major economic problems, mainstream economics views money as a mere afterthought, a technical device which only makes barter less cumbersome. Consequently, money is not seen as something significant for the understanding of our economies, except for a few empirical problems like the causes of inflation. Since the emergence of economics as an autonomous scientific domain in the social sciences area, most theoretical and empirical researches have failed to offer a relevant definition of money and subsequently to draw consistent modeling of a monetary economy.