Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is standardly assumed, by apologists and critics alike, to have offered a theory of what money is: a “means of exchange” whose raison d’etre is to ease the inconveniences of barter. The present discussion rejects this consensus. Read charitably, neither Smith’s origin story in Book I nor his account of “the great wheel of circulation” in Book II traffics in a theory of what money is. Rather, the Wealth of Nations offers no theory of the nature of money at all. What Smith presents, instead, is a functionalist story of a piece with David Hume’s empiricism, which does not make any claims about natures or essences. Smith’s reply to the mercantilist theory of money—that money is specie—is not a rival theory of money’s true nature, but rather a broad depiction of the various ways money brings “conveniency.”
