Review of Money and Calculation: Economic and Sociological Perspectives

There has been a considerable revival of academic interest in questions about the fundamental nature of money and its role in modern capitalist economies during the past decade. This has been evident mainly in the social sciences outside the mainstream of academic economics, but even here there has been some attempt to resolve the paradox that formal economic theory—particularly equilibrium theory—has been unable to explain money’s existence and to assign it an essential role in its models. These questions have become increasingly important and unavoidable in the face of the enormous expansion of evermore complex calculations of risk and value in financial and money markets. This collection of essays is the result of a workshop held at Bocconi University in May 2008 to explore these issues from a diversity of perspectives—phenomenology, economics, sociology and some contributions that defy such conventional classification.