Social Foundations of Markets, Money, and Credit

by Costas Lapavitsas

Where does the power of money come from? Why is trust so important in financial operations? How does the swapping of gifts differ from the exchange of commodities? Where does self-interest stop and communal solidarity start in capitalist economies?
These issues and many more are discussed in a rigorous, yet readable, manner in Social Foundations of Markets, Money and Credit . It is shown in particular that capitalist economies are permeated with non-economic characteristics.
This carefully argued book will prove interesting and valuable to students and researchers not only in economics, but also in sociology and anthropology. Well-informed critics of capitalism will also find it a useful read.

Genres: Economics

192 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2003

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

So what are the “social foundations of money, markets, and credit"? According to Lapavitsas they are relations of trust, power, and fiat. His book explores how these relations ground the economic practices of lending and exchange under capitalism and how the capitalist credit system socializes and generalizes those relations while stamping them with capitalism’s peculiar monetary character. Throughout the book, Lapavitsas is constantly demonstrating how his Marxist position fits into a variety of debates regarding, for example, the opposition between commodities and gifts, how social norms ground credit relations, theories attempting to explain the emergence of money, and what a possible socialist “money” system would look like. In addressing these debates he briefly covers such schools as institutionalism and social capital theory or Austrian and Walrasian neoclassical theory or Post-Keynsianism and Ricardian Socialism. It’s a short but dense book that carefully examines its topic in light of much empirical and theoretical work by others.