[...] currency the name of a certain social relation, and money the name of the desire to which this relation gives birth.

Michel Aglietta and André Orléan made the decisive contribution of refuting the substantial (intrinsic value) and the functional (convenient means of exchange) approaches to understanding currency, seeing it rather as a social relation, buttressed in institutions, and as complex as the social relation of capital. Currency is thus not a value in itself but the operator of value. Above all, it is fundamentally the effect of a collective belief in its efficacy as a means of repayment, since everyone justifies accepting the monetary sign by the fact that everyone else is equally and reciprocally willing to accept it. The production of this common acceptance of a sign, which is ultimately perfectly arbitrary since it lacks any intrinsic value, is the monetary question par excellence. This essentially fiduciary nature of currency, long occluded by the illusions of metallic fetishism, must be brought to light if one is to grasp that it has no substantial character and is fundamentally interpersonal – in other words, that at the scale of the whole society it is a social relation. Monetary institutions have no other function than to produce and reproduce that social relation of shared recognition and trust which, attached to some sign, establish it as a universally accepted means of payment. [...]