Review of Shahzavar Karimzadi ’ s Money and its origins . London : Routledge

A fascinating subject can make a great book, and money is one of the topics that have captured the public mind and the intellectual interest of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent financial collapse (circa 2008), and particularly its reverberations in the European Union, has energized the debate around money and led to a new wave of publications of books and articles on the subject. The question of the origin of money may not seem directly relevant to the troubles of the Eurozone but it remains important and relatively neglected. The detailed analysis of Shahzavar Karimzadi's book certainly fills the gap, and also has something to contribute to contemporary debate about monetary policy. The book is an exposition and a critique of the different accounts of the origin of money, and the definitions of money that are related to them. Karimzadi examines a long list of candidate explanations for the passage from a moneyless to a moneyed economy, usually based on a single causal mechanism associated with barter exchange and its limitations (the division of labor, surplus production, exchange, degrees of marketability), and finds them all wanting. Karimzadi argues, rightly I think, that a system of pure barter is a convenient fiction invented to support an account that has remained relatively unchanged since the time of Aristotle, and that in any case the limitations of barter alone cannot explain the origin of money. He goes on to argue that each and every candidate explanation is illuminating but partial, and cannot alone account for the origin of money. Karimzadi is also skeptical of the definitions that support the different accounts, which privilege a specific function or 'form' of money, because he finds them too restrictive to describe money in all its complexity and mutability. If one declares that money is defined by its function as a means of exchange and proceeds to offer an analysis of its origin in those terms, such an