(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust

Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice
Vol. 1, No. 1 (2025)
ISSN 2833-051X

(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust
By Rob Hawkes

Abstract

This article argues that the neochartalist perspective on money opens up new ways of understanding trust. While neochartalism has, on occasion, been interpreted as a departure from the view that trust underpins money, this article contends that, in emphasising money’s irreducible publicness, neochartalism supports a view of money as essentially trust-based. Highlighting the blurriness of the concept of trust via a theoretical analysis of a range of approaches to and definitions of the term, across a range of disciplines, I reject calculative, strategic, and transactional formulations in favour of an understanding of trust as a form of openness that is simultaneously conditional and unconditional. Considering trust in relation to the ideas of confidence, faith, dependency, and vulnerability, I affirm the radical vision of social inclusion towards which neochartalism’s rejection of the barter myth points and argue that it provides the basis for a new approach to the conceptualisation of trust itself.

Rob Hawkes is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at Teesside University, UK. He is author of Ford Madox Ford and the Misfit Moderns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS), and a Fellow of the English Association. He is currently completing his second monograph, Literature, Money, and Trust, 1890-1990: Monetary Modernisms.