John Rogers Searle - Money, Social Ontology and Law

The authors are very grateful to Einaudi, and in particular to Andrea Bosco, who first proposed and promoted the publication of Il denaro e i suoi inganni. They are also thankful to Mariano Croce and Marco Goldoni, who direct the Routledge series Law and Politics: Continental Perspectives. And, equally, to Colin Perrin.

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John Rogers Searle

I hold in my hand a United States $20 bill. It is, like most things we take for granted, philosophically astounding. (One mark of a philosopher is to be amazed by what any sane person takes for granted.) The bill contains a lot of writing, much of which is the repetition of the number twenty, eight times in numerals and three times in words, Twenty Dollars twice and Twenty once under a seal. It contains only two sentences: This note is legal tender for all debts public and private (How do they know?) and In God we trust (What happens to those who do not trust in God? Is it not money for them?). It also contains pictures of Andrew Jackson and the White House, and various seals and serial numbers as well as the words Federal Reserve Note. The United States of America occurs on both sides. This chapter is primarily concerned with the question: What fact or facts make this a piece of paper money? To understand why it is money and what it means to be money you have to understand a whole civilization. I will not explain the whole civilization, but I will explain some of the money part. In writing this text, I discovered a series of deceptions (illusions, systematic falsehoods) in the institution of money, and I will try to identify them.

I also have on my computer screen a photograph of a Confederate $100 bill. It is even more amazing. It says The Confederate States of America will pay the bearer $100 on demand; all of that is in large print. But in much smaller boxes on each side of a picture of an unnamed woman, it says, two years after the ratification of the treaty of peace, then in the next box, between the Confederate States of America and the United States of America. Though both bills are supposed to function in the same way, as money, their status as speech acts is quite different. The American bill is a Declaration. By Declaration, this piece of paper counts as $20 in the United States. The Confederate money is a Commissive, a complex conditional promise. It says the government promises to pay the bearer on two conditions: first that there is a ratified treaty of peace between the Confederate States of America in the United States of America, and second that two years have passed since the peace was ratified.