Hospitality versus Exchange: the Limits of Monetary Economies

This paper attempts to specify theoretically the origins of money. Rather than the exchange-based view of neoclassical economists where money is seen as a transaction cost-reducing instrument (and where exchange itself is asserted to be a universal phenomenon), we argue that money is a social relationship, specifically a debt relationship, that emerges with propertied, class society. "Primitive" (pre-class) society could not generate money, as the rule of hospitality, universally practiced among such organizations, precluded debt and the self-interested behavior that is consistent with debt. Adopting the Chartalist position on the matter, we show that money is symptomatic of privilege, of inequality, of economic and political power.