English credit: teoria e storia di una fede vittoriosa.

The following dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part is mainly theoretical and deals with one of the major riddles that have obsessed economic thinking at least from the times of Aristotle: the search for a theoretically sound and historically adequate account of the origins of money. The solutions offered, among other thinkers, by Adam Smith, Carl Menger, Alfred Mitchell Innes, Georg Friedrich Knapp, Philip Grierson have broadly been discussed, but eventually they have been found by the author insufficient to solve the mistery. A better result can be obtained if the problem is posed after an intellectual translation operated with the tools offered by analytic philosophy; more than a simple enlargement of the scope of the research, the - Wittgensteinian in spirit - solution I propose is an entirely new perspective that allows to escape the tantalizing finding of an essentialistic definition of money. In this way, the centre of the attention is more on “money” (the word) and less on money as object (the different kind of things taken into account by economic and anthropologic literature). This new point of view is extensively used in the second part of my dissertation, which is mainly historical, and helps to clarify the still unclear role of the so–called “imaginary money” in the economic facts of the Ancien Régime. The last and most extensive chapter of my dissertation deals with the peculiar form of money that emerged from 17th-century England, particularly after the establishment of the Bank of England (1694). The originality of the reconstruction lies in the attempt to explain the birth of credit-money as the birth of new form of popular faith (Creditt).