Page 8 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

social finance. These topics have become even more relevant for the global
economy after the severe financial crisis of 2008, as well as the more recent US
banking turmoil in 2023. In the same way, some literature has started
investigating the fragility of the banking business and the risk of banking crises by
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connecting money, religion, and the concept of trust (as this article intends to do
– for additional considerations on the points, see later at section 5). Last but
certainly not least, the centrality of trust in relation to the sound functioning of
any economic community has been re-affirmed with reference to the growth of
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the markets of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies .
Focusing here on the concept of moral economy (as the most significant in
relation to the comparative investigation that this article wishes to undertake),
Götz underlines that, if prior to the eighteenth century there was no ‘economics’
as a science (being Adam Smith’s Wealth of nations, 1776, traditionally considered
the first text of the discipline in the West), the concept of ‘moral economy’ is even
much newer, as it has been popularised only in 1971 by historian Thompson with
reference to the English working class. While commenting on the present usage
in the literature of the expression, Götz notes that «for centuries moral economy
has been endowed with a more universal meaning. It has served as a synonym
either for a divine order given to the world or for the human condition. Today it
offers an antithesis to the ‘rational choice’ imperatives that conflate rationality
and utility maximisation in a crude material sense and dominate the present
political imagination» .
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While there is no doubt that the notion of moral economy is certainly useful
today to describe alternative ways of utility maximisation through the
construction of altruistic meaning for economic transactions, one has also to agree
with Hann (2016) that this concept in contemporary literature «has been
trivialized through its faddish application to almost everything (Christopher
Hamlin’s “moral economy of the aquarium”, published in the Journal of the History
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of Biology as early as 1986, is a nice example)» .
For instance, the oversimplified equivalence between Islamic and ethical
finance (that is certainly convenient for its assertors: both in replicating the
scheme ‘secular West’ vs. ‘religious/moral East’, and in re-affirming the moral
superiority of Islam over Western capitalism in a pattern of differentiation culture)
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constitutes a core aspect of the literature of Islamic moral economy .

15 E.g., TYNAN - MILESI - MÜLLER (2017, eds.), Credo credit crisis. Speculations on faith and money,
London, 2017.
16 DODD, The social life of bitcoin, in Theory, Culture & Society, 35 (3), 2018, 35-56.
17 GÖTZ, ‘Moral economy’: its conceptual history and analytical prospects, in Journal of Global Ethics,
11 (2), 2015, 147; also, with reference to ARNOLD, Rethinking moral economy, in American Political
Science Review, 95 (1), 2001, 85.
18 HANN, The moral dimension of economy: work, welfare, and fairness in provincial Hungary, in Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers, Working Paper No. 174, 2016, 3. In this regard,
also FASSIN, Les économies morales revisitées, in Annales, 6, 2009, 1237-1266.
19 «This self-feeding description of Islamic finance and law as intrinsically ethical is widespread

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