Sacred Money
* Book: Sacred Money: A Historical Investigation into the Sacred Origin of Money. Bernard Laum. Shoin House, 2023.
(English Trans. of Heliges Geld, Bernhard Laum, 2nd ed. ; also translated as 'Holy Money')
Description
1.
"a great classic on the history and nature of money. Sacred Money sets forth a surprising and fascinating theme to trace the origin of money to antiquity and to uncover its root from the sacred legal order (nomos) in the ritual. Laum demonstrates that money is a fundamental institution of social life beyond the purely economic domain. He peels away one layer after another until the totality of a chain of events becomes visible to readers finally. He reveals the grand illusion that the modern economy is based on, i.e., the belief in the spontaneous creation of money and the market by free and equal individuals. This book is one of the great classics and also one of the most controversial books in the history of the theory of money, with severe criticism and cyclical revivals of interest among scholars over the last 100 years since its first publication."
2. From the publisher:
(translation of the description of the Germany edition ?)
"Holy Money is the long out-of-print study that for the first time, and to this day unrivaled in its wealth of sources and ideas, explores the theory of the religious origin of money and its extra-economic significance. In it, twenty years after Georg Simmel's philosophy of money, the scholar of antiquity and economic historian Bernhard Laum comprehensively develops the idea that money developed out of a kind of "religious trade" and that any reflection on the phenomenon of money only makes sense if it traces its history. He finds the birth of money in the cult of sacrifice, examines premonetary forms of money, and the nature and origin of coinage. He proves that money is a "creature of the legal order" and that the payment property of money is older than its medium of exchange function. "Step by step, Laum develops his story, which sometimes reads like an archaeological detective novel: one layer after another is peeled away until finally a chain of events becomes visible, all of which together bring about what can probably be called the grand illusion of modernity." (Christina von Braun).
(https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/book/heiliges-geld.html)