Presenting legal and philosophical essays on money, this book explores the conditions according to which an object like a piece of paper, or an electronic signal, has come to be seen as having a value. Money plays a crucial role in the regulation of social relationships and their normative determination. It is thus integral to the very nature of the "social", and the question of how society is kept together by a network of agreements, conventions, exchanges, and codes. All of which must be traced down. The technologies of money discussed here by Searle, Ferraris, and Condello show how we conceive the category of the social at the intersection of individual and collective intentionality, documentality, and materiality. All of these dimensions, as the introduction to this volume demonstrates, are of vital importance for legal theory and for a whole set of legal concepts that are crucial in reflections on the relationship between law, philosophy, and society.

Contents:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION (by A. Condello)

1. Why a Book on Money?

2. Why This Book on Money?

3. Money, Social Ontology and Law

CHAPTER I

Money: Ontology and Deception (by J.R. Searle)

1. The Functions of Money and the Definition of Money

2. Social ontology

3. Status functions are created by declaration

4. Money is Always a Status Function

5. Further Forms of Deception and Money

6. Money and Deception, a Summary

7. What is Money?

CHAPTER II

The Color of Money (by M. Ferraris)

0. Introduction: Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg

1. Epistemology

1.1. Analysis

1.2. Manifest Image

1.3. Deep Structure

1.4. Pentecost or Emergence

2. Ontology

2.1. Dialectic

2.2. Necessary Condition

2.3. Sufficient Condition

2.4. Power and Form

3. Technology

3.1. Competence without Understanding

3.2. Iteration

3.3. The Mystic Foundation of Authority

CHAPTER III

Socio-legal Reality in the Making. Money as a Paradigm (by A. Condello)

1. A Basic Social Institution

2. Overview on Searle's and Ferraris' Theories of Money

3. Social Reality and Law: Cross-Breeding Intentionality with Documentality

3.1 The Symbolic Socio-legal Object for Searle: Money as Status Function

3.2 Tracing Socio-Legal Reality: Maurizio Ferraris' Documentality

4. Broadening the Field: from Money to Legal Reality

4.1 Res, pecunia, lis

5. Conclusion. Socio-Legal Reality in the Making

CONCLUSION (by A. Condello)

1. Means of Exchange

2. Money (as Law) is a Social Technology

Bibliography

Acknowledgements