Is all money credit and is all credit money? Lawson revisited

Abstract This article resumes the exchange in the Cambridge Journal of Economics between Tony Lawson and Geoffrey Ingham (Lawson, 2016, 2018a; Ingham, 2018). It challenges Lawson’s subsequent critiques of the credit theory of money and repeated claim that his social positioning theory of money resolves the incompatibility between credit and commodity theories. Lawson mistakenly alleges that credit theory explains money’s debt-settling power in the same way as commodity theory in terms of money’s intrinsic properties. The grounds for his counterargument that commodities per se and credit/debt per se only become money when ‘socially positioned’ is challenged. Lawson’s distinctions between (i) credit or commodity per se and credit or commodity ‘positioned’ as money; and (ii) between money’s nominal essence as a general means of payment and its real essence in the rights and obligations by which this function is enacted cannot be sustained. Lawson’s method prevents the understanding of Ingham’s analysis of the ‘duality’ of money’s nature as both abstract and actual. The validity of social positioning theory does not require the unequivocal dismissal of credit theory with which it shares common ground.