理解货币的两种思路：历史与评价

Two Ways to Understand Money: History and Evaluation

对货币的理解一直困扰着各个时代的思想家们。从经济思想发展史来看,存在着两种理解思路:将货币理解为商品的主流思路和将货币理解为信用的非主流思路。主流理解思路将货币看作一种商品,以交易媒介职能为基础衍生出价值储藏和价值尺度职能,形成了基于交易媒介和价值储藏的两种分析框架,但都遇到了难以解决的根本性难题。非主流理解思路有着同样悠久的历史,但是在立论基础、理论构建和政策建议等方面同样存在难以克服的理论局限。鉴于两种思路都存在理论困难,可以从马克思的二重性视角对其加以融合,以辩证地认识货币的多元内涵,为货币理论发展奠定现实基础。

The understanding of money has always puzzled thinkers of all ages. From the history of economic thought development, there are two ways of thinking: the mainstream way of thinking about money as a commodity and the non-mainstream way of thinking about money as credit. The mainstream understanding way regards currency as a commodity, with the transaction media function as the foundation to derive the value storage and value scale functions. Thus two analytical frameworks are formed based on the transaction media and value storage, but they have encountered fundamental problems that are difficult to solve. The non-mainstream understanding ideas have a similarly long history, but they also have insurmountable theoretical limitations in terms of argumentation foundation, theoretical construction, and policy recommendations. In view of the theoretical difficulties existing in both ideas, they can be integrated from the perspective of Marx’s duality so as to dialectically understand the multiple connotations of money and lay a realistic foundation for the development of monetary theory.