Abstract
Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, but on the other, it is conventional and variable in its uses. While it is controversial if money instantiates a fully-fledged sign system, it is rife with semiotic capacities. To present an illuminating analysis of money is thus a test case for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of meaning making, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Using MSM, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the three levels of MSM: the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning and propose different series of “loops” to account for the genesis of money. Despite key differences in the two origins, both imply semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influenc present-day concepts of money.
1 Introduction
Money is a most puzzling semiotic phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, appearing in societies with little commerce, as in Yapese fei (Furness 1910). On the other hand, it is deeply conventional and variable in its uses, with striking differences in how it has been physically and institutionally realized across time and space. For many economists, money is a symptom of economic demand; the rate of turnover from one person to the next is the focus of attention, with individual acts of exchange receding into the background in favor of its aggregate “velocity” (Fisher 1911; Friedman 1987). Mainstream economists, however, tend to treat money as an ideally “neutral” factor of economic activity, a veil for barter, something not intrinsic to economic growth.[1] Money can connect the bearer and recipient emotionally in a realm of their shared reality, forming distinct and identifiable “us” from all the varieties of “them.”
In semiotics it is controversial whether money constitutes a (fully-fledged) sign system, and if so, of what kind. Some scholars (e.g., Bingham 2014; Leder 2018; Wennerlind 2001), continue to refer to Saussure’s well-known analogy between money and language, used to help explicate the key notion of value:
to resolve this issue, let us observe that even outside of language all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things, that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined. Both factors are necessary for the existence of a value. To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must therefore know (1) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g., bread; and (2) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature, another word. (Saussure 1959: 115)
This quotation is interesting, as it reflects a rather surprising for Saussure triadic semiotic analysis: the “dissimilar” thing that words and money can be “exchanged with” are outside the system and in a sense, referential, while it is the internal relations of “similar” units that are essential for determining linguistic, and monetary value. However, a “five-franc note” does not denote, signify or refer to “bread” or “coins of another system,” in the way that linguistic signs do, as argued by Sinha and Rodriquez (2008: 366). Likewise, Oakley (2022) criticizes the money-as-language analogy, if taken too literally.
However, there are other models for analyzing the semiotics of money. More recently, Bankov (2019) offers a broadly Peircean scheme for the “money sign” consisting of the sign (corresponding to Representamen), the value/asset (corresponding to Object), and most interestingly, the guarantor/bank (with, at most, a very lose correspondence to Interpretant). Like us, Bankov attempts to reconstruct the evolution of money, and proposes that “commodity money” (e.g., denominations of precious metal) based on sign-asset relations came first. This was followed by “representative money” (e.g., gold standard foreign exchange regimes prominent from the 18th to 20th centuries), with all three semiotic aspects involved. Finally, we have “fiat money” (e.g., globalized “floating exchange” regimes of present times),[2] where the only relevant relation is between the sign and the guarantor. While the evolutionary scenarios that we present below differ, they concur with Bankov’s (2019) analysis in two respects. The guarantor element points directly to the normative and institutional nature of money systems, which we claim is an essential precondition for money. But even more fundamentally, and historically more ancient, is the other factor emphasized by Bankov: trust.
Even if the “proper” semiotic analysis of money remains controversial, it is clear that its semiotic capacities are legion: it can produce new social relations and states of affairs based on the bearer’s authority and the recipient’s situation; it can be the means of making an emphatic request, of demanding something in return; it can signify the status of a participant in a community (Keller 1998), by social identification or differentiation, historical pedigree, nationalist aspiration, and the relative strength or weakness of a sovereign. How could this surplus of variegated meanings of money emerge in human civilization?
To help answer this question, we draw inspiration from Edmund Husserl’s classical phenomenological essay Origin of Geometry, where he aims to reconstruct a link from primal intuitions about space to the ideal meanings of mathematics, by analyzing “the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning” (Husserl 1970 [1936]: 371).[3] To answer the question “How does geometrical ideality (just like that of all sciences) proceed from its primary intrapersonal origin, where it is a structure within the conscious space of the first inventor’s soul, to its ideal objectivity?” (Husserl 1970 [1936]: 358) – it is necessary, according to Husserl, to account for how originally more bodily anchored aspects of meaning could become eventually more and more dis-embodied, and in a way “ideal.” The title of our article pays tribute to Husserl for providing an initial outline of a method of studying meaning-making, based on the tensions between embodiment and historicity, the traces of which are, metaphorically speaking, recovered through careful archeological surveys of their sediments. This approach has in more recent years become known as generative phenomenology (Steinbock 2003), in the sense of generations whereupon ideas and practices become sedimented and thus established as traditions.
At the same time, in contrast to geometry, where “the conscious space of the first inventor’s soul” could possibly be intuited, for example by reliving/imagining the acts of topographic surveillance of the first geometers, the origin of money is anything but plausibly intuited through a singular process of some hypothetical “first monetizers.” Hence, a preoccupation with the origin of money would risk reflecting the preoccupations of the origin-seekers. With the intention of being more pluralistic and open to multiple origins of money, we therefore use the plural “origins” in our title. Further, despite the complex and shrouded history of money generally, a focus on its origins in the form of primal idealities issuing from bodies existing within specific social and historical formations appears as a worthwhile challenge for semiotics, and especially for cognitive semiotics, with its grounds in phenomenology (e.g., Sonesson 2007; Zlatev 2018). A particularly pertinent tool that suggests itself from this discipline is the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM), which was developed precisely to help account for the complex interactions between bodily experience, social interaction and “sedimenting” cultural formations (Devylder and Zlatev 2020; Zlatev and Blomberg 2019; Zlatev et al. 2021).
The structure of our argument is as follows. In Section 2, we present some necessary preliminary definitions of key notions, including the crucial one of institution. We describe MSM briefly in Section 3, along with some elaborations that are useful for our further analysis. In Sections 4 and 5, we apply the model to analyze the phenomenological and historical dynamics of money by looking closely at two historically complementary developments: precious metal coinage in archaic and classical Greece – at least one of the origins of commodity money, and the apparently earlier system of turning beings into debtors and creditors to one another and the state – the origins of credit money. Section 6 concludes by suggesting that commodity money and credit money still comprise the two dominant – and divergent – conventions of monetary thought driving economic and financial theory and policy today. We also suggest that the potential of MSM to comprehend these two divergent conventions without the need for supplementary postulates lends support to it as a general model of human meaning-making.
2 Definitions: habits, conventions/norms, and institutions
A complex, multilayered enterprise such as that outlined in the introduction will inevitably sow confusion without first clarifying key concepts, namely: habits, conventions, norms, and institutions. Only then may we proceed to examine the parallel origin accounts of money.
Let us begin by way of example. Every Wednesday at 8 am, one of the authors (Todd) goes to the local grocery market for the week’s shopping. He is there when it opens and is greeted by the store manager and workers – stockers, butchers, bakers, cashiers, and baggers. It is accurate to regard this recurring event as a habit, in the sense that appearing at the store’s doors at the time of opening on this day manifests a recurrent pattern in Todd’s life, as a “typical” part of the work week. Inevitably, circumstances and schedules intervene to cause Todd not to go on this day and/or time. To the extent that this deviation from habit produces no untoward consequences, either psychically or socially, such an arrangement remains a “mere habit.”
But consider the fact that others (the store manager, stockers, cashiers, and baggers) begin to take notice when Todd arrives ready to do the weekly shopping at a different day and time, oftentimes greeting him with the question, “Where were you on Wednesday?,” for which he can respond with an explanation (e.g., “I was out of town”). We have now entered the world of conventions, insofar as Todd’s habit produces a stable and self-perpetuating set of preferences, expectations, and actions that persist indefinitely, much like the proverbial housewives of Königsberg setting their clocks to Emmanuel Kant’s afternoon walk. In this respect, the habit becomes a convention: it is a solution to a problem of coordination (see Lewis 1969: 42), however slight or trivial, signifying that Todd and the workers are doing something together: he is buying what they are selling. Todd’s habit becomes a convention as the “appointed time” shapes the expectations of others.[4]
To continue our example, when Todd arrives at the market checkout on Thursday afternoon, he is greeted by Diane, the cashier, who asks, “What happened to you yesterday morning?” He then responds with an explanation (e.g., “I had an early meeting at the university”). What is noteworthy is Todd’s own sense of obligation to provide such an explanation. Strictly speaking, he was under no formal obligation to explain and could have either stayed silent or even refused by saying “None of your business!” This feeling of obligation, however, stems in part from the norms of politeness in conversation: when someone asks you a question, you are supposed to provide an answer, especially when the topic of conversation is phatic. But what, in fact, elicits the cashier’s question in the first place, aside from the desire to engage in familiarizing banter? In some respects, he has “missed his appointment with the grocers” without prior notice. These others have a social investment in Todd as a customer who shops at this fixed time, and deviations from this time are not normal. An explanation is needed to reestablish expectations. Todd’s response assures as much as it explains, indicating that the convention still holds and that one should expect him to arrive promptly next week at the “agreed upon” time. In other words, conventions always have an explicit (“spelled-out”) or implicit (“silent”) normative dimension. Note that these are most often conventions/norms we inhabit or live by, which are distinct from the prescriptions and laws that we are told to obey (Zlatev and Blomberg 2019).
Further, conventions/norms become the stuff of institutions. A de minimis definition of institution is to simply equate it with convention, as Douglas (1986: 43) does in her excursus on how institutions think. Earlier definitions in sociology and economics from Veblen (1899) specify institutions as coordinated systems of habits of thought. Our view is that conventions are a necessary but not sufficient condition for institutions, and, thus, they are more than conventions/norms. As stated by the sociologist Jonathan Turner, institutions are “those population-wide structures and associated cultural (symbolic) systems that humans create and use to adjust to the exigencies of their environment” (2003: 2). Another definition by Tomasello and colleagues are equally compelling by emphasizing the systematic (if dynamic) and normative aspects of institutions: “Social institutions are collaborative cultural practices with joint goals and standardized roles, with social norms governing how rewards are dispensed, how cheaters and free riders are treated, and so on” (2012: 684). In sum, we may understand institutions as sociocultural structures-processes that are unique to human cultures, with population-wide effects on thought and action.[5]
Underlying this definition is the implication that institutions differ from conventions/norms in terms of explicitness, scale, and systematicity, emphasizing social roles and positions as accessible to reflection and alteration. Institutions should not be considered mere environments of behavior but as macro forces that enable populations to adapt to their environments (Turner 2003: xiv). They are, according to Mary Douglas, “entropy minimizing” and “act as guides to what to expect from the future. The more fully institutions encode expectations, the more they put uncertainty under control” (1986: 48).
To return to our example, Todd’s habitual shopping schedule becomes a convention on which other agents form expectations whose compliance or contravention can engender notice and even social sanction, which, in turn, only takes shape within a complex of social institutions of kinship, economy, polity, and law, with Todd as the “shopper” who pays for groceries with US dollars, the proceeds of which go toward the wages of the employees and profits of the owners, and tax collection of local, state, and federal governments. The habitual schedule must conform to the hours of operations set by the establishment, labor law, and customs, and thus works within the institutional bounds of markets. Thus, money – including the social structures in which it is embedded – is a social institution whose general purpose is to put uncertainty under control by storing value. That money often fails in this purpose highlights another fact: institutions require repeated legitimation, often by means of analogy to nature and the physical world (Douglas 1986: 48), as we argue in Sections 4 and 5.
3 Embodiment and culture, motivation, and sedimentation
The Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) arose within the field of cognitive semiotics to be able to deal with the complex interactions between pre-verbal, and indeed pre-signitive, experience on the one hand, and social structures like conventions and institutions, including those of language, on the other. It is based on phenomenology, and above all the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (2005 [1962], 1964, 1968), which both continued and in some respects transcended the work of Husserl (Akhtar 2010; Hass 2008). On the other hand, the three levels of the model are directly inspired from those in the “integral linguistics” of Eugenio Coseriu and his followers (Coseriu 1985, 2000) but extending these beyond language, and replacing the “universal” level with one based on the body, in light with the phenomenology of perception (Moskaluk et al. 2022).
As mentioned, MSM posits three distinct, but dynamically interacting levels of meaning-making: the Embodied, the Sedimented, and the Situated, spelled with capital letters to avoid terminological confusion given the ambiguity of these terms, and especially “embodiment” (Rohrer 2007; Sonesson 2007; Zlatev 2007), as shown in Figure 1. Each level is characterized by an internal dialectics of process and structure, with processes both sedimenting into structures, and being motivated by the latter, thus avoiding the “structure versus process” dichotomy in favor of a “dialectics of spontaneity and sedimentation” (Merleau-Ponty 2005 [1962]; Zlatev 2018). Importantly, the Embodied level of meaning is both pre-linguistic and pre-signitive (i.e., not based on sign use), engulfed in the richness of what Merleau-Ponty called “the visible”: processes of Gestalt perception and motility, bodily interactions with things, empathetic direct perception of other persons. As eloquently expressed by Hass, this is the level of meaning where
[L]iving experience emerges through the symbiotic intertwining of one’s own pulsing body, the overflowing, transcendent world of things, and the living bodies of others… [Such] experience is sensual, affective, inter-dynamic, and especially carnal. Indeed, against intellectual systems and models that suppress, deform, or denigrate these basic truths, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology “says to show” what we actually experience in life. Not mechanistic objects constituting an abstract Newtonian universe, but flesh, organic life, and a natural world. Not clusters of sense-data, but sensually rich things and artifacts: trees and mountains, chairs and buildings. Not solipsism, but complex relations and carnal contacts with other creatures. (Hass 2008: 146)
The Motivation & Sedimentation Model: The motivation relation is represented by solid lines and the sedimentation relation by dotted lines, on “genetic” (horizontal) and “generative” historical (vertical) time scales (adapted from Zlatev and Blomberg 2019).
Note how distinct this is from other, more reductionist, notions of “embodiment,” in terms of biological, neural and “cognitive unconscious” processes (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In MSM, the Embodied level does not interact directly with the one adjacent to it: the Sedimented level. Rather, it motivates the situated expressive acts on the Situated level, and indirectly the relatively unstable situated norms into which they may be locally sedimented, for example, the different manners of speaking to a friend and a casual acquaintance (Zlatev and Blomberg 2019). It is only with historical time, across generations, that these coalesce down onto the Sedimented level of relatively stable norms and institutions, which then co-motivate future expression on the Situated level, as shown in the second upward-pointing arrow.
The name of the model naturally derives from the two types of relations that link the levels (and the mentioned structure-process duality of each). This first one is motivation, which always “points” towards more-or-less creative expressions from more-or-less sedimented structures. Importantly, this is never a determinative relation, as it necessarily leaves space for unpredictable and creative expression (Blomberg and Zlatev 2014; Coseriu 1985). The converse relation is that of sedimentation, either “genetic” on the horizontal axis or “generative” on the vertical dimension: taking place in individual lives and social encounters, and over generations and historical time, respectively (e.g., Thompson 2007).
As pointed out above, MSM adopts a phenomenological and broad concept of bodily experience, far beyond notions like “neural embodiment” or “material embodiment,” while encompassing the valid aspects of such notions (see Pielli and Zlatev 2020). The Embodied level thus includes all that is pan-human, including the capacity to see and make analogies, which is not something that is purely done “by the mind/brian” (Damasio 1994; Noë 2004; Rowlands 2010). Analogy making is necessary, as we show in the next section, to form legitimizing analogies, of the kind discussed by Douglas (1986), who has argued that the stabilizing principle of all social institutions is “naturalization.” This implies that there needs to be an analogy by which the formal structure of a crucial set of social relations is mapped onto phenomena in the physical world, or in a projected supernatural world, so that it is not conceived as a socially contrived arrangement. When the analogy is applied back and forth from one set of relations to another and from these back to nature, its recurring formal structure becomes easily recognized and self-validating (Douglas 1986: 48).
Further, compared to previous formulations, we also include “bodily adornment” and “bodily modification” as processes on the Embodied level, since they are universal and go back to the dawn of humanity (McBrearty and Brooks 2000). As such, these activities are an essential aspect of the human ‘lived’ body (Leib) which ultimately constitutes the nexus between us, others, and the world (Zahavi 2014). To remind one last time, the phenomenological body is not a biological but and experiential phenomenon, that goes “beyond the skin,” involving peri-personal space, objects, and affordances, which are necessarily intersubjective (Zlatev and Blomberg 2016).
In the following two sections, we use MSM to analyze to distinct origins of the institution of money: one more recent and more specific in Section 4, an even more archaic and general one in Section 5.
4 Origin α: coinage in archaic Greece (the purity of money)
The rise of coinage in the Western world appears around the seventh-century BCE in Asia Minor, principally in Lydia and a century later in Athens (Kraay 1964; Kurke 1999; Price 1968, von Reden 1997). From the start, coinage as general-purpose money was paradoxical, as noted by von Reden (1997: 176). On the one hand, it established a standard of value within a polis that supports moral conventions associated with the institutions of family, religion, law, polity, education, and markets. On the other hand, it established similar standards of value to respond to situations outside a community’s moral system, threatening to conventionalize a range of untoward activities.
Evidence of the historical dynamics of archaic coinage accrued by archeology, historical writings (principally Herodotus), and didactic poetry can be interpreted with the help of MSM in the form of three loops of motivation and sedimentation, as depicted in Figure 2, and explained below.[6]
Three consecutive motivation-sedimentation loops for Greek Coinage.
4.1 Loop 1a: habrosunê of the aristocracy
Homeric Greek culture (∼800 BCE) was aristocratic, with little evidence of society-wide monetization. Wealth and exchange revolved around conquest and gift-giving (Mauss 1967 [1925]). Herodotus provides the earliest historical account of gift exchange (dóro) among the elites in the Kingdom of Lydia (Western Anatolia) at its apogee in the seventh century BCE. Gold jewelry emerged as means of expressing appreciation to another while also signaling one’s own virtue. Over time, body adornments in gold emerged as a convention of manifesting habrosunê (‘bodily perfection’). Receivers (hetaireia) – loosely translated as ‘companions’ or ‘courtesans’ – were given direct access to the gods, and, thus, possession thereof confers protection from chance and strife. Bestowers could reveal their “meddle” by demonstrating that their gift is of exceptional quality. Gold possesses physis (‘nature’ or ‘essence’) of purity and perfection that redounds on the gift-giver, suggesting that the person can bestow gold because he is an aristocrat.[7] The amount and quality of gold signify the degree of his status as an elite, while the adorned body of the companion comes to manifest vicarious bodily perfection. The receiver and giver thus both share in bodily perfection, a mode of vicarious fulfillment: my perfection manifests through your bodily perfection.
From these apparent facts, we may posit the first motivation-sedimentation loop (see Figure 2) starting with bodily adornment as a practical response to a situation of reputation management through reciprocal altruism (i.e., giving up something of value to someone else – if they do likewise). It then becomes sedimented as an instance of gift-giving: the exchange of “this gold” constitutes the “gift” – now a sedimented convention which in turn motivates (S-motivation1) the interaction (Situation1). The normative aspect of this convention can be formulated as a hypothetical imperative: “if you want to demonstrate care for your companion, and if you want others to see how much you care, then you give up your gold.” As a result, habrosunê of an elite companion’s body demonstrates aristocracy: one can give gold precisely because one is an aristocrat.
In further support for this analysis, Kurke (1999: ch. 1) notes a developing “language of metals” in archaic and classical poetry, with gold and silver as analogs of trust and reliability. For instance, the didactic poet Theognis of Megara (∼500 BCE) reveals in lines 415–418 of collected fragments of Theognidea: “Seeking, I can find no trusty comrade like to myself, the sort who has no trickery within. But going to the touchstone, I am exposed like gold rubbed beside lead, and we have the reckoning of Superiority” (quoted in Kurke 1999: 50).
The conceit that measuring someone’s character resembles the process of rubbing gold or other metals against a touchstone to test their purity speaks to the role of precious metals as a reliable means of projecting character. Just as the gold is pure, so is an elite companion. There should be a sufficiently similar means of assaying a companion’s trustworthiness. In a somewhat extended version of the MSM model, we can call such derivative analogical inferences as motivations that combine the Embodied and Sedimented levels into E/S motivations. So, the situation that we just described is motivated by E/S motivation α, as shown in Figure 2.
4.2 Loop 2a: staters for spot exchanges
Democratic practices in the eight-century began to shift the power center from the elites to the bodily polis, what Kurke (1999: 334) calls the analogical contrasts between physis and nomos (‘nature’/’essence,’ and ‘function’/’law’), between hetaira and pornê (‘courtesan’ and ‘prostitute’) and between dóro and nomisma (‘gift’ and ‘coin’).[8] These anti-elite practices developed into the use of coins that imposed order on the messy exchanges of the agora. The choice of gold was a way for the polis to co-opt the divine protection of the elites as a prophylactic against fortune and fate. Possession of a gold coin protected the bearer; it was a hedge against uncertainty because the bearer of the gold coin now had status and credit. In this way the city, in controlling the value (nomos) of the gold coins, could have it both ways: it could at once engage in all the messy, earthy, and profane lifeways through the mediation of the divine and noble essence of gold.
We can describe this transition in terms of our analysis as follows. The sedimented convention of gold gift exchange among elites serves as the analogical basis for deriving a generalized convention of exchange: S-motivation2. In contrast to gold gifts, these electrum alloys (gold and silver), known generally as stater (lit. ‘weight’), with denominations of kapithe, siglos, obols were of uniform weight, which eased trade across political boundaries (von Reden 2010: 67). This derivation essentially democratizes the hierarchy, institutionalizing exchange practices beyond the parochial boundaries of the elites: instead of a person possessing gold because one is an aristocrat, an individual becomes part of a community because one possesses staters.
In this way, money trades on the analogical link between the preciousness of gold and the nominal tokens of exchange to form a bond of institutional trust. S-motivation2 highlights a peculiar feature of symbolism that derives from E-motivation2: the iconic image fronting the stater (see Figure 2) can serve as the cultural analogue of a “Green Beard Effect”:[9] a distinctive sign serving as a short cut for others to assess kinship and familiarity. In essence, anyone possessing these tokens in the agora becomes an (ad hoc) member of the community, meaning that the elites no longer exercise strict control over the exchanges and practices of the polis or between poleis. Coinage generates considerable anxiety among elites, as manifested in remarks of didactic poets of the archaic and classical periods. For example, the sixth-century poet Anakreon (582–485 BCE) mocks Artemon through the hetaira/pornê antimony:
Formerly having a turban, wasp-like head coverings,
and wooden knucklebones in his ears, and a worn ox
hide around his ribs, unwashed covering of a lousy
shield, keeping company with bread women and
willing whores, wicked Artemon made his living by
crime, many times putting his neck in the stocks,
many times on the wheel, and many times having his
back scourged with a leather lash, and his hair and
beard plucked out; but now he mounts carriages,
wearing golden earrings, the child of Kyle, and bears
a little ivory parasol – just like women.
(quoted from Kurke 1999: 187)
This screed is directed against the social climber, depicted at the beginning with all the accouterments of his lowly, criminal status – only suddenly to appear as an ersatz “Ionian aristocrat” (cf. Brown 1983: 14). Thus, the appearance of coinage expands the wealth and power of the erstwhile lower classes to fake aristocrats, a counterfeit nobility.
We can see the very notion of democracy (credited to Solon) connotes the indiscriminate and motley availability of resources within the public sphere, not least of which is sex, as recounted by Philemon (362–262 BCE).
Seeing the city crammed with young men…
you set women you’d bought in [public] places…
They stand there naked, lest you be deceived: look
everything over. Say you’re not doing well, you’re
feeling erotic. The door’s open. [Price] one obol: jump
right in. There’s no coyness, no nonsense, she doesn’t
snatch [herself] away, but straightaway whichever one
you want and in whatever position you want. Then out
you go: tell her to go hang, she’s nothing to you.
(quoted from Kurke 1999:197)
In the aristocratic imagination, the demos of Lydia and later Athens makes that which is lowborn – high; that which is personal – impersonal; that which is profane – sacred. Once an accurate barometer of purity and body perfection, gold and silver become agents of deception and counterfeiting. For the elites, ventriloquized by the didactic poets, the very notion of coinage is an affront to trustworthiness. Be that as it may, the new convention of gold coinage was from then on here to stay, providing the basis for social interaction and trade in an increasingly cosmopolitan world.
In sum, Loop 2 takes the sedimented convention of precious metal gift exchange, commandeering its primary commodity – gold – and minting it into coins of uniform weight and setting the standard of value by the polis, to embody a new material culture of spot exchange, such that it is the possession of staters that makes the man, not the privilege of aristocrats to possess gold that makes the man.
4.3 Loop 3a: Athenian silver coins
Roughly a century after the first coinage appears in Lydian, evidence of a similar process emerges in Athens and other nearby city-states. Athenian staters, which come to be known as drachmae (derived from the verb drássomai), ‘(I) grasp,’ were minted using pure silver instead of gold. Kurke (1999: 302) argues that the choice of silver was both practical and ideological: practical insofar as it was procured from the abundant Laureion silver mines under Athenian control; ideological in as much as it stood in symbolic opposition to aristocratic identification with gold. Silver was a “middling” metal, not as “high” as gold (which was also the exclusive province of the gods and the divine) but more precious than bronze and other “adulterated” alloys. Prior to the Peloponnesian war, silver was the only metal used in minting drachmae. Only when Sparta denied Athenians access to these mines did they resort to minting bronze tokens.
This development is shown in our analysis as Loop 3 (see Figure 2) as a recapitulation of the S-motivation2 into S-motivation3, a convention of minting precious metal tokens of silver stamped with images of Athena and other icons of Greek life, of uniform weight and denomination, allowing for Situation3: spot trades in the Athenian agora. The renowned purity of Laureion silver quickly came to embody a political ideology of Athenian exceptionalism, as exemplified by this fragment attributed to Xenophon (435–354 BCE):
And again, there is [land] that has silver beneath it, clearly by divine
allotment: for, though many cities are our neighbors, both by land and
sea, not even a single small vein of silver ore goes through into any of
them. (quoted from Kurke 1999: 306)
Once again, the existence of precious metal veins gives evidence of divine favor but not for the aristocracy as for the entire Athenian polis. Because silver was so pure, it came by way of a similar analogical process to be associated with citizenship proper. As in Loop 1 there is a similar analogical inference combining both the Embodied and Sedimented levels, or E/S motivation β. The dokimasia – proceedings comprised methods by which the democratic city “proofed” its citizens – were instituted to test the quality of a would-be citizen’s birth and behavior. These tests were conducted by the Boule, a 500-member council, hence the council gains symbolic authority by analogy to precious metals. It is then the privilege of a “newly minted” dokimastes to assay currencies of anyone entering the Athenian agora, as evidenced by this inscription:
To accept Attic silver currency when [it is shown to
be] silver and has the public stamp. Let the public
dokimastes sit among [the] tables and evaluate [sc.
coin] in accordance with these provisions every [day
except] whenever there is a cash payment; at that time
let him evaluate in [the bouleuterion.] If anyone
proffers [foreign silver currency] having the same
stamp as the Attic, [if it is good,] let him return it to
the one who proffered it; but if it is [bronze at the
core,] or lead at the core, or counterfeit, let him cut it
across [immediately] and let it be sacred to the Mother
of the Gods and let him [deposit] it with the Council
… And if anyone does not accept silver currency the
dokimastes has approved, let him be deprived of all
the things he has for sale on that day.
(quoted from Kurke 1999: 311)
To recapitulate, Archaic and ancient Greek coinage presents us with an account of the origin of money that emphasizes the natural or metallic manifestations of its signifying practices. The ground for the process is to be found in the bodily experience of precious metal tokens on the Embodied level. With loops of social interactions on different manifestations of the Situated level, the value of various tokens eventually sedimented into “monetary value,” a conventional conception of money that persists among the classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Europe that is still widely influential to this day. From the analysis offered in this section, it follows that the sedimented practices of precious metal coinage would not have been possible if these did not derive from loops of motivations from the Embodied and Sedimented levels (often fused together) and are thus anything but arbitrary. In the words of John Locke, “Money answers all things” (1824 [1695]: 113), but this does not make it abstract of “ideal.” In fact, commodity money is always visible and tangible.
5 Origin β: credit in Mesopotamia and elsewhere (money as atonement)
The analysis given in the previous section may give the impression that coined money counts as “the” single origin of the institution of money tout court. This, however, is not the case, as coined currency comes relatively late in the history of monetization. What is more, the currency is not of Greek or Western origin, as Chinese money in the form of cowry shells (∼1800 BCE), and later copper spades and knives (∼1200–800 BCE), predate Greek general-purpose coinage by at least a century on the low end of the estimate (P’eng 1993 [1954]). Nonetheless, it appears that early cowrie shells started out as gifts from the kings to the nobility, recapitulating similar social dynamics of the “trickle-down” conventionality from aristocracy to plebians we see in the Lydian case, analyzed as Loop 1a in Section 4.
More fundamental than the precise historical provenance of coined money is the strong evidence for the creation and maintenance of credit systems, for which the most robust and systematic evidence appears in Mesopotamia ∼4,000 BCE. The parallel generation of credit money appears as tally sticks, ledgers that track credit and debt, thus suggesting that the social roles of creditor and debtor are of primal importance to the origin of money. In fact, it is possible to offer a set of MSM loops for the development of credit money, as shown in Figure 3. These are in fact more basic because the presence of credit systems does not entail the corresponding presence of coinage, while the presence of coinage does entail the presence of a credit system, thought by many economists and economic historians as the basis of modern money systems (see Graeber 2011; Innes 1914; Keynes 1930; Knapp 1924; Wray 1998).
Five consecutive motivation-sedimentation loops for credit systems.
5.1 Loop 1b: reciprocal altruism (primordial debts)
Aside from the fanciful stories of barter told in Chapter 4 of his Wealth of Nations and Daniel Defoe’s account of bartering between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, there is little anthropological evidence to suggest that money systems evolved directly out of barter (see Graeber 2011: 21–43 for an overview). An alternative starting point begins with the notion of obligation – how one ought to behave in a social context. Situations of reciprocity, of sacrificing time, energy, and resources for the benefit of others, arise repeatedly and often, but often contingently. In small bands of familiars, it is sufficient to rely on memory and gossip to generate a reasonable expectation that favors will be reciprocated. For example, Jordan’s doing a favor for Todd today informally obligates Todd to do a favor for Jordan in the future. In this social scenario, Jordan can be said to be positioned as the “creditor” and Todd as the “debtor,” until Todd does a favor, discharging his obligation. Such tit-for-tat cooperation is likely to develop under conditions of open-ended interaction (see Axelrod and Hamilton 1981), where the participants routinely interact, such that Todd’s defecting (i.e., refusing to help Jordan when he needs it) may result in Jordan not coming to Todd’s aid in another “hour of need,” but, perhaps even more important, Todd’s reputation within the larger community might suffer third-party sanction. Todd’s reputation for welching on his obligations may precede him, further isolating Todd from the group.
We can thus stipulate an S-motivation1 of contingent in-kind reciprocity for situations glossed as “I do you a favor, you do me a favor.” This convention develops from a basic motivation on the Embodied level of being an able body, and arguably of having an innate propensity to be pro-social, at least for in-group members (Sober and Wilson 1999; Tomasello 2009). In fact, much of the bodily help in traditional, nomadic- or sedentary-hunter-gatherer groups entails coordinated bodily work (see Boyd et al. 2011: 10919). Something like Jordan helping Todd inspect ice holes for hibernating seals if we were members of the Netsilik Inuit tribe of the Arctic Circle. Bodily cooperation is fundamental to collective life–in fact, there is very little chance of survival in these circumpolar environments without constant bodily cooperation. Conventions of obligation that turn members into reciprocal debtors and creditors is a commonplace, pan-human facet of human existence that gets magnified in such an inhospitable geography, but which operates continually but often much more inconspicuously in urbanized environments. In our MSM account, S-motivation1 produces the conditions for E/S-motivation α, the normative conventions associated with reputation management, e.g., Todd is someone known for paying his debts, and thus, is “good for it.”
5.2 Loop 2b: upper paleolithic and Mesopotamian accountancy
Some of the earliest and most interesting artifacts of behavioral modernity appear as wolf bone tally sticks, some as early as 20,000 years BCE, most famously the Ishango Bone found in a site located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These wolf bones consist of three columns of notches, which Plester and Huylebrouck (1999) consider to be among the oldest mathematical tools of humankind. The placement and structure of the columns present a clear mathematical intention to engage in various methods of accounting and distribution. Wolf bone tally sticks are thus among the earliest known evidence of behavioral modernity based on numerical conventions. In our analysis of credit systems, this can be stipulated as S-motivation2 – the convention of calculating or quantifying something of interest to the community, or Sitiation2. Why is this relevant as far as money is concerned?
Generative phenomenology in general, and MSM in particular, is concerned with the primordial insofar as it points to the historical limits of our understanding. In this case, we see the traces of the complementary motivations from the Embodied and Sedimented levels to jointly constitute a key feature of behavioral modernity: numeracy. Numeracy is a social phenomenon, as its primordial function is to account for the apportionment of resources within a community. In this sense, MSM Loop 2b stipulates a range of social activities so deeply sedimented that the best evidence points to a very dim past of Homo sapiens’ need for tracking socially significant quantities, and beyond the interpretation that such artifacts signify features of elementary arithmetic (including base 10 and base 12 systems with submultiples of 3, 4, and 6) little can be said other than the fact that persons are keeping track of objects and other persons (Wadley 2015).
Thus, S-motivation1 stipulates a convention of reciprocity familiar to the workings of relatively egalitarian, heterarchical communities and enclaves. Person A helps person B, with the derivative effect of person B bearing an obligation to A. As communities became increasingly sedentary and populous during the Holocene (∼10,000 years ago), social structures became increasingly hierarchical, with clearly demarcated roles and divisions of labor. In these conditions, S-motivation1 (contingent in-kind reciprocity), and S-motivation2 (numeracy), serve as basal conditions of S-motivation3 leading to the next loop.
5.3 Loop 3b: perpetual reciprocity (heroic and quotidian sacrifices)
The new S-motivation3 implies perpetual reciprocity of a subject to lord and lord to king – characteristic of feudal arrangements. It is precisely at times of birth of such monarchical arrangements that we see subjects pledging fealty to a ruler, who, in return for the ruler’s protection (e.g., preventing a subject from being enslaved by an adjacent polity) bears a perpetual obligation to sacrifice for said sovereign (and the deity for whom the sovereign serves and is the presumed source of power). A subject performs heroic feats out of a perpetual obligation to – and with the expectation of reward from – a sovereign. For example, the Geatish warrior Beowulf’s service to the Danish King Hrothgar in slaying Grendel and his mother in recompense for Hrothgar’s paying the ‘debt’ (wergild) of his then young father, Ecgþēow, for the slaying of Heaðolaf (see Beowulf 2012: ll. 455–471).
Most of the daily sacrifices of feudal existence did not comprise such exalted and dangerous sacrifices but rather involved all manner of subjects offering in-kind provisions in the name of the sovereign, from black smithy and gold smithy to brewery and cookery. Under this dispensation, a subject is under perpetual debt to the sovereign. Be the sacrifice heroic or quotidian, S-motivation3 derives an additional E/S-motivation β, namely, the recognition by the sovereign of the subject’s sacrifice in the form of medals and other aggrandizing plaudits, E-motivation3. These status symbols are essentially a kind of “bearer-credit” that enable the subject to accrue social capital manifested as affection, trust, and respect.
5.4 Loop 4b: taxation
In contrast to the ragged mountains, craggy coastlines, and relatively isolated tribes of the inhospitable seaboard geography that was the Archaic Greece of Homer, Mesopotamia was an immense fertile landscape of rolling hills and rich alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The ancient city of Ur comprised a vast concentration of people with surpluses of agricultural goods that were dispensed under the strict apportionment of a semi-divine king, a great ziggurat temple to Nanna, and the Gununmah, the enormous warehouse of goods administered by a clerical administration, of virtually every aspect of Ur economy (Martin 2013: 38–45). Mesopotamia was the site of humanity’s first known command economy. Denizens of Ur existed not just as persons but as entries in ledgers, either as debtors or creditors.
As shown in Loop 4b of Figure 3, S-motivation4 accounts for the sovereign exercise of power by enforcing regular tributes (taxes) from subjects. What is critical here is that the sovereigns will only accept the regular and periodic discharging of debts through the forfeiture of resources acceptable only to them. Subjects must do the things necessary to “earn” the form of tribute needed to pay one’s taxes, hence E-motivation4: subjects must obtain the proper “bearer-credit” and then transfer it to the sovereign. When subjects pay their taxes, their debts are “forgiven,” effectively repositioning themselves as being in “good standing.” E/S-motivation γ in loop 4b stipulates the normative convention of the taxation cycle. On this analysis, for over 4,000 years, nothing has been certain except death and taxes, to paraphrase the American Statesman, Benjamin Franklin.
5.5 Loop 5b: spot exchange
In the MSM analysis in Figure 3, loops 1b–3b can be seen as concerning the social ontology of obligations in general – of habitual and normative conventions of reciprocity and social standing within a community. With Loop 4b, we are homing in on the social ontology of debt, properly speaking. As David Graeber puts it, the difference between an obligation and a debt is that a debit is precisely quantified (2011: 21). What is more, many of the earliest works of moral philosophy, such as the first books of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, provide sustained meditations on the morality of debt.
Let us once more exemplify with a simple case. Consider the situation in which Jordan buys Todd a beer. Todd then reciprocates and buys Jordan a beer. Both Jordan and Todd paid for the beer in Swedish Krona. Under this dispensation, Jordan does precisely 82.43 SEK “units of favor” to Todd, and Todd reciprocates with precisely 82.43 SEK “units of favor” for Jordan. Why did we reciprocate with favors denominated in Swedish Krona?
The answer may seem obvious (but it is often overlooked): Todd and Jordan were at a bar in Lund, Sweden and the establishment accepted Krona as payment. But why does the establishment accept only Kronor?[10] Because the establishment pays its taxes in SEK, as do its employees and the majority of its customers. Here we have a situation codified by S-motivation5 – the practice of individuals (be they citizens or subjects) settling debts through sovereign currency. The reason Todd exchanges dollars for Krona and the bar accepts both Jordan’s and Todd’s offer of Krona stems from it being maximally fungible to the proprietors as a store of value and method of payment, since everyone in Sweden must pay tribute to the sovereign, who only accepts Krona.
In the above scenario, cash works well but is not necessary, as other forms of payment are possible, provided they are denominated in SEK. We see a very similar situation emerge in medieval England with the use of tally sticks for spot exchange. A medieval tally stick is a wood receipt–split down the middle, with identical inscriptions on both ends. The “stock” end was then held by the creditor (much like a bearer bond) and the “stub” or “foil” end was held by the debtor. During the reign of Henry II (1133–1189), the Exchequer began the process of selling stock ends of tally sticks for provisions to the Court (e.g., livestock, tools, weaponry, gold, silver, etc.). If the recipients kept the stock end of the tally, they possessed a tax credit they could use to discharge future debts. Soon a new E/S-motivation δ emerges, whereby the possession of these stock-ends signifies a stable form of value, the bodily possession of which can be used in spot exchanges, and often were, hence E-motivation5. It was not uncommon for these tally sticks to circulate for generations among private subjects, never to make their way back to the Exchequer to be reunited with their stubby counterparts (see Martin 2013: 17–19).
A similar story of credit money can be told about a place far away from Europe. The Polynesian Island of Yap received keen interest from the ethnographer William Henry Furness III, whose famous book The Island of Stone Money (1910) has been periodically rediscovered by economists when forced to think about the nature of money. The Yapese fei consist of very large sandstone wheels, the smallest denominations of which are roughly one foot in diameter, with largest denominations more than twelve feet in diameter. The thing about a fei is that even the smallest units cannot be easily exchanged. Yet, it appears that fei represented the wealth of individuals, families, or clans. If your family was the recognized bearer of a twelve-foot diameter sandstone wheel, you could procure all the fish, coconuts, and sea cucumbers you like, villagers would assess value of an individual fei by index finger-to-thumb spans to debit the value of the goods against the credit of the fei, noting the credit to the sellers (Furness 1910: 96). Thus, a gigantic manifestation of E-motivation5, body-adornment-at-a-distance. In this respect, a fei may have operated much like the gold standard: The larger the fei, the greater the store of credit, much like a nation’s gold reserves at a central bank.
To sum up, Mesopotamian credit money offers a complementary origin account to that given in the previous section: emphasizing money as a means of social positioning (see Lawson 2015), in which monetization comes to substitute special purposes modes of value (such as in-kind reciprocity) with universal economic value as a standardized method of measurement, and for which the physical token (signifier) is transmutable – be it coin, note, bond, tally stick, or gigantic limestone wheel. The credit monetary conception accepts that money can be denominated in a commodity of some sort, but that it becomes “money” at precisely the moment when it ceases being a commodity – you, yourself cannot “dig it up,” “grow it,” or otherwise “create it” (Graziani 2003). Credit money is always invisible and intangible but made manifest through the veil of its manifold forms.
6 Summary and conclusions
In this article, we applied the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) to help explicate two of the dominant origin accounts of money currently available: coinage in Greece, and credit in Mesopotamia. Despite the important differences between them, we have shown that both can be seen as the outcome of the dynamics of motivation and sedimentation processes at three interpenetrating levels: Embodied, Sedimented, and Situated, whereby the third provides the immediate existential conditions of expression and meaning motivated by the first two. These two origins, and their corresponding explications are, as we have shown, both similar and different, and interestingly, correspond to different influential theories of the evolution of money.
On the first account, for precious metal coinage, the institutionalization of money begins and ends with precious metal as an ultimate sign of purity that is then analogized to bodies, persons, and polities. The issuance of trust and value starts with gold and silver, and we think, emote, and act through these precious metals. The explicit norm of substantial purity is the alpha and omega of economic value. Such “monetary physicalism” has been widely influential in economic and political history, as well as some semiotic accounts of commodity money (see Bankov 2019). An influential point in the English-speaking tradition was John Locke’s (1824 [1695]) Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money, which, in turn, influenced the classical economics of Adam Smith (1976 [1776]), David Ricardo (1817), Jean Baptiste Say (1833), and John Stuart Mill (1885). On these accounts, money sits outside the “real” economy, and merely offers a convenient substitute for barter. The quality and quantity of the material in question is the necessary condition for monetization.
On the other account, based on credit creation the institutionalization, money begins and ends with the social positioning of persons, organizations, and polities as creditors or debtors: two primordial social categories that appear to stretch back to the Upper Paleolithic period, with signifying functions indicating one’s status relative to other persons, groups, or sovereigns. Here the emergence of credit or debt is motivated not by any species of commodity but by the signifying capacity of the material form to express value against an agreed upon, and ultimately, alterable standard. On this account, the quality and quantity of the material in question is, at best, one condition for monetization, if users trust it. The issuance of trust and value starts with normative rules and procedures of accounting, distributing, and transferring of credit and debt. Such “monetary artifice” was prominent among economic and financial experts since at least the time of Solon, but expressed systematically by Nicolas Oresme’s (1864 [1390]) Tractatus de origne, nature, iure, et muticionabus monetarum, an early-Renaissance tract explaining the credit nature of money followed by a line of treatises from William Lowndes (1695), John Law (1705), Walter Bagehot (1877), A. Mitchell Innes (1914), Knapp (1924), and John Maynard Keynes (1930), wherein money sits inside the economy, determining the precise character of economics, law, and politics. As in the first origin, the conventions of the institution of money remain motivated, but the sedimentations and motivations are determined by the extent to which they point to this underlying system of credit: money has multiple avatars.
What we have aimed to show is that neither of these two is the ultimate “single origin,” but that both, and possibly other sources of the pan-human institution of money, are complementary, and often appear in tension with one another, with monetary physicalism gaining prominence when monetary systems start to fail, and with monetary artifice operating inconspicuously when the society-wide credit and debit accounting goes according to plan.[11]
Being able to provide a generative phenomenological analysis for both can be seen as “proof of concept” for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) as a general explanatory framework from human meaning making in and over time, where some of the most perduring and widespread social structures can be explained anew. Particularly, our MSM-based account reveals that the concept of credit money sublimates the Embodied level of the materiality of the token in favor of its more transcendent values of credit and debt, while the concept of commodity money represses such credit and debit meanings in favor of the transcendent value of the commodity itself. The motivated norms of these two traditions are complementary: monetary physicalism regards the intrinsic properties of a token as a necessary condition for monetization, while monetary artifice regards such properties as historically contingent and of only one condition for monetization. Importantly, in both traditions the signifying functions of money are grounded in motivations from the Embodied and Sedimented levels, and are thus conventionalized, but not arbitrary.
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