Money as Organization, Gustavo del Vecchio's Theory

The recent study by Gianfranco Tusset 'Money as Organization: Gustavo del Vecchio's Theory' is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct Gustavo del Vecchio's theory of a monetary economy. Tusset’s starting point is the analysis of the intellectual context of Italian political economy at the turn of the 20th century, which the author describes as characterized by a strong interest in ‘economic change’, a view of the economic actor as a ‘complex agent’, and a methodological disposition towards ‘scientific realism’ (Tusset, pp. 5-6). These three focal points are closely intertwined and call for a research horizon in which attention for historical change requires a multi-dimensional view of economic actions, and a causal plurality that avoids ‘any reductionism that might obfuscate the variety of factors influencing economic change’ (Tusset, p. 6). Important building blocks of del Vecchio’s theory of money are the interplay between the individual and the social dimension; the consideration of the monetary economy as a hierarchical arrangement of different ‘selling groups’; the investigation of interest and credit as means to adjust the relationship between monetary stocks and flows under the assumption of heterogeneous time horizons for different groups.