The Legal Illusion of a Cashless Society

Money is not a legal object like any other, since it reflects the system of social relations. Examining money cannot therefore be a simple exercise in analyzing monetary law or political economy: it also requires us to understand the strength of the relationship between Europeans. In her work on the use of cash in the United States between 1870 and 1930, sociologist Dr Viviana Zelizer demonstrates how the monetization of society, i.e. the physical exchange of small sums of money, contributed to the establishment of lasting relationships within the US monetary community. This social, non-monetary dimension of money is closely linked to its fiduciary form. By proposing the creation of a digital euro, the EU institutions intend to respond to the digital transformation of the economy and to the increasingly strong competition from private currencies. To what extent this innovation will affect the cash from a social science perspective? This paper proposes to put money
back into perspective through a legal, sociological and anthropological discussion of its non-monetary form and functions.