La moneta nella storia: dal “baratto” all’Euro digitale

This chapter briefly retraces the history of money, challenging the traditional evolutionary narrative according to which it developed from barter to metallic money and, ultimately, to increasingly dematerialized forms. Instead, it shows that money originally emerged as an immaterial unit of account, serving to regulate economic and social relations, and only later assumed material forms as a medium of exchange and store of value. Through a historical analysis spanning antiquity, the premodern European system of “imaginary money,” the English financial revolution, and the era of fiat money, the chapter highlights the central role of political authority in determining monetary value. From this perspective, the digital euro appears not so much as a radical break, but rather as a return to the origins—or, more precisely, as a reminder of what money has been called to be from the outset: a pure unit of account for the regulation of exchange and investment relations, oriented toward distributive justice.