Introduction Recent advances in money theory make it necessary for economists (and for social scientists in general) to reconsider their views about money;1 not because these advances are irresistible and convincing but because they create strong incentives to a critical re-examination of what economic theory of money is about. The main conclusion of such a re-examination is the ambivalence of the new money theory. Modern theoreticians of money wrongly attribute to money the role of a social memory, but they rightly demonstrate that, in a very special case, money performs a decentralized control of individual actions which makes market economies possible.