ABSTRACT
Introduction Bernard Schmitt demonstrates scientifically in his quantum theory of money and production that payments hinge on absolute exchanges and not, as the vast majority of economists believe, on relative exchanges, which at rock bottom would be barter. In this, he continues along the path Keynes opens up in asserting that the principles governing our economies are not the principles of a realexchange economy. Keynes contests the representations by which economic relations are supposedly articulated upon reciprocal transfers of goods and money among autonomous individuals: “The theory which I desiderate would deal, in contradistinction to this, with an economy in which money plays a part of its own and affects motives and decisions and is, in short, one of the operative factors in the situation” (Keynes 1933/1973: 408). However, although he radically dismisses the idea that economic activity is based on relative exchanges, Keynes fails to give any explicit indications about the nature of the exchanges we engage in daily. It is only with the works of Bernard Schmitt that it has come to be understood that the economic circuit is not tantamount to a space in which money and goods cross paths as they move around.
