Money-Exchange Systems and a Theory of Money

Abstract

Karl Polanyi saw that for a money to be fully exchangeable, or 'catallactic', there were matters stich as 'quantitivity' (Polanyi et al. 1957: 73) that played an important role along wvith the overriding matter of the development of the market and of market exchange. Such insights have stimulated the present attempt to consider money in comparative and theoretical terms in relation to 'quantitivity' and any other such general feature it might possess. A later statement of Polanyi's (I966: 174) offered an important further suggestion: 'In general ternis, money is a semantic system similar to speech, writing or weights and measures'. It seems clear that Polanyi's ideas on the general character of money were not exhausted once he had made the distinction between the 'special purpose' moneys of non-market economies and the 'general purpose' money of a market economy, although he did not develop these ideas or give them a place in his general scheme. However, the most important recent work on money fronm a comparative point of view, that of Dalton (Dalton i965; see also Einzig 1949 and Quiggin 1949), is not only confined, as was his work with Bohannan (Bohannan & Dalton i962: I-26), to the use of Polanyi's general and special purpose distinction; it continues to argue along with Polanyi against any further generalising about money, which is to say it argues for the abandonment of all further theorising about nmoney. It is best to quote Dalton in full on the subject of the foolishness of the 'quest for a single all-purpose definition of money':