Abstract: |
This paper puts Marcel Mauss’s concept on money in the context of economic
theories. Mauss articulated his thoughts on money in the first decades of the
20th century. They are considerably less known and discussed than his famous
essay on ‘the gift’. Nevertheless, his contributions on the origin and
function of money are worth being examined in economics as well as in
economic-anthropological discourse. This essay relates Mauss’s ideas to
microeconomic theories. The argument pursued is that his concepts on money are
both compatible with neoclassical, and with New Institutional Economic
theories. For this purpose, the text addresses three parallels. |