Jean-Michel Rey's Genealogy of Credit from John Law to Contemporary Monetary Theory

Jean-Michel Rey's book "Le Temps du crédit" (published by Éditions Desclée de Brouwer) traces the genealogy of credit from the 1720 bankruptcy caused by John Law's introduction of paper money in France. Law believed economic modernization required a currency detached from gold, sustained solely by public trust—what was called "credit." Rey argues that credit creates a double time: the unlimited time of desire and death, and the limited time of shared speech and exchange. The book examines this through literary and philosophical works from Montesquieu's "Lettres persanes" to Robert Musil's "The Man Without Qualities," and contemporary monetary theories. Rey rethinks value as something that depends not on possession, being, or production, but on speech and belief—the word by which one pledges trust and the belief that transubstantiates that declaration into a future. He notes that the symbolic deflation inherent in the fiction of credit is expressed in the traditional language of Catholic faith. The book offers a novel perspective on the fragility of the social bond.