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

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.