John Locke and the Politics of Monetary Depoliticization (Modern Intellectual History, online first June 2018) (original) (raw)
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John Locke and the Politics of Monetary Depoliticization
Modern Intellectual History, 2018
During the Coinage Crisis of 1695, John Locke successfully advocated a full recoinage without devaluation by insisting on silver money's “intrinsick value.” The Great Recoinage has ever since been seen as a crucial step toward the Financial Revolution and it was long regarded as Locke's most consequential achievement. This article places Locke's intervention in the context of the postrevolutionary English state at war and reads his monetary pamphlets as an integral, if largely neglected, part of his political philosophy. Instead of taking Locke's insistence on “intrinsick value” itself at face value, I argue that it was precisely money's fragile conventionality that threatened its role as a societal bond of trust. In response to this fragility and corruptibility, Locke tied money by fiat to an initially arbitrary but unalterable quantity of metal. While Locke's argument contributed to the modern naturalization of money, it arose from a paradoxical political a...
Coin Reconsidered: The Political Alchemy of Commodity Money
Medieval coin plays an essential role in the imagined history of money: it figures as the primal "commodity money" -a natural medium, spontaneously adopted by parties in exchange who converge upon a metal like silver to represent the value of other goods. As a natural medium with a price objectively established through trade, commodity money appears to offer an independent means of measure in the market. But as the history offered here reveals, medieval money was nothing like its imagined alternative. England's early coin became a medium when the government began to spend and tax in that unit of account, took coin as a mode of payment, and allowed it to be transferred between people in the meantime. Individuals participated in the arrangement, paying for coin in exchange for the unique quality -liquidity -that set money apart from a commodity. That quality was orchestrated by the very channels that brought public and private together in the project of making a medium. In fact, insofar as the English equated money with the commodity it contained, they engineered instability into the heart of their medium. Depreciating coin -diluting its commodity content -offered a cure. It also confirmed that coin had never been the "commodity money" imagined in later accounts. Coin was, instead, a constitutional medium, one that related the government to its participants and thus helped to configure the world it appeared merely to measure.
Money, Morality, and Accumulation in John Locke's Theory of Property (Review of Politics 73:1, 2011)
Review of Politics, 2011
John Locke's theory of property has been the subject of sustained contention between two major perspectives: a socioeconomic perspective, which conceives Locke's thought as an expression of the rising bourgeois sensibility and a defense of the nascent capitalist relations, and a theological perspective, which prioritizes his moral worldview grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. This essay argues that a closer analysis of Locke's theory of money in the Second Treatise can provide an alternative to this binary. It maintains that the notion of money comprises a conceptual area of indeterminacy in which the theological universals of the natural law and the historical fact of capital accumulation shade into each other. More specifically, the ambiguity of the status of money enables Locke to navigate an antinomy within the natural law such that he establishes a relation of necessity between the divine telos and accumulative practices.
The Great Recoinage of 1696: Charles Davenant's Developments in Monetary Theory
The English Great Re-coinage of 1696 was one of the great monetary events in history. The English currency, a bimetallic standard based on the weight and fineness of the coinage, was debased in order to pay troops in the Netherlands during the Nine Years War. By 1695 almost 50% of the specie content was missing from coinage in circulation, causing a monetary crisis. The May 1695 actions of demonetisation of England's debased coinage and the issuing of new full-weight coin were instrumental in the creation of the British Gold Standard. This national monetary standard became the International Gold Standard during the nineteenth century. Charles Davenant, an author of economic tracts, politician and civil servant, was an important voice during the re-coinage policy formulation period. Davenant's theory of paper credit and his model of the circular flow of income provide a reasoned and critical analysis of the English monetary system in the 1690s and the potential impact of policy options being entertained by the Crown. This paper attempts to look beyond the traditionally studied debate between John Locke, Isaac Newton and William Lowndes; into the deeper theoretical and political concepts behind the final decision to re-coin the English currency. In this paper the impact of Davenant's monetary theory and his submission to Lord Godolphin on the action to re-coin will be investigated and placed within the wider context of the 1694-1695 Commission on the Coinage. JEL Classifications: E5, Nl, N2 THE GREAT RE-COINAGE OF 1696 Developments in Monetary Theory §1. Introduction
The American Revolution and Christine Desan's New History of Money
Law & Social Inquiry, 2017
This essay argues that Christine Desan's Making Money: Coin, Currency and the Coming of Capitalism intervenes decisively in debates over the origin of money, while making a fundamental contribution to the legal history of money, the philosophy of money, and the history of capitalism. Desan shows money to be a mode of governance, created by rulers to extend their power, and maintained and managed by their successors. She argues that British politicians reinvented money at the end of the seventeenth century, creating the essential institutional basis for contemporary capitalism. The essay builds on Desan's analysis, showing how the tools she develops to understand the origins and development of British money can help us explain the expansion of capitalism, and the transition to capitalism associated with the American Revolution.
Review of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism, (review no. 1829)
's fascinating book approaches the only seemingly obvious act of 'making money' by examining what it actually means to 'make money'. While Desan does acknowledge the physical act involved in this process, such as the striking of coins and the printing of bills, her primary focus is to study what gave money value and validated it as a reliable medium of egalitarian exchange. She makes it very clear that in order for money to function, i.e. circulate and be accepted, it needed to be centrally enforced. This enforcement became easier when kingdoms were united. However, to give individuals confidence in a currency, there needed to be an obvious demand for it. The central government would create and perpetuate this demand through taxation, and accepting their money as payment (p. 50). Her first chapter also emphasises the main arguments that run throughout the book: she does not believe that markets created money-it was money that created the market. This certainly makes sense when the reader considers that the exchange of goods would be difficult without a standardised measure of value. Desan also notes that this standardisation of value through money would only work in a world created by money (pp. 60-1). The creation of standardised value through coinage also enabled the value of labour to be defined, which would ultimately ensure that labourers with no goods to trade could still gain access to the market.
2013
I am honored to deliver the 2012 Blanqui Lecture to the ESHET annual conference here in London. It goes without saying that it was a great pleasure to hear that my book had been selected for the ESHET Book Prize that carries with it the invitation to give the Blanqui Lecture. Addressing ESHET in London is especially moving since much of my Ph. D. on the Ricardo-Tooke-Marx link in the development of monetary theory was prepared here, working in the great Goldsmith Library (when the internet was a dream) under the supervision of Professor Laurence Harris. I attended the first ESHET conference in Marseille in 1997, and since then consider our association as a crucial one for anyone interested in the history of ideas. Among the scholars that I consider as "My Heroes"-those who at some point had attracted and influenced me-some, like Hume, Marx and Keynes, still continue to do so. Over the years they did not comprise a uniform set and when I returned to read them from time to time it was naturally a different reading. Regarding the sub-field of the history of
Lockean Money, Indigenism and Globalism
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1999
There are no nations, there are no peoples …. There is only one wholistic system of systems, one vast, interwoven, interacting, multivariant, multinational domain of dollars. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today.—Clarence Jenson Network, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1976When the seats of power and authority have been attained, there should be no more poetic license.—J. M. Keynes