Credit, Debt and Money as Social Institutions of Trust

Abstract

While the notions of credit, debt and money are today almost exclusively associated with economic discourse, their semantic fields prove to be significantly wider and more complex. This article seeks to restore the repressed meanings of these three notions. Its aim consists of a deconstruction of the dominant economic narratives on credit, debt, money and trust, that would show that these concepts should be primarily considered as social, rather than solely economic institutions. Therefore, in the introduction we will look at the etymology of the word credit and disclose its semantic proximity with magic as a social practice. Furthermore, the first section will examine the intrinsic relation between debt and credit, departing from Marcel Hénaff’s three types of symbolic debt and exposing how these shape the financial credit in neoliberal capitalism and install the creditor-debtor relation (such as Maurizio Lazzarato describes it) as predominant at all levels of society. The second section shows how relations of credit and debt crystallize in the notion of money: firstly by exposing some major historical and anthropological insights about money; moreover, by considering money from an onto-axiological point of view as the knot in which all social relations of trust culminate; and finally, by relating the three different types of trust in money, proposed by French heterodox economists Michel Aglietta and André Orléan, to the three forms of symbolic debt, thus showing how credit, debt and money are fundamentally anchored in social relations.