James Steuart and the making of Karl Marx’s monetary thought (original) (raw)

This paper analyses the influence of James Steuart on Karl Marx's monetary thought. It deals more specifically with Marx's rejection of an automatic mechanism that links variations in the quantity of money to their direct impact on prices. Steuart's pioneering discoveries in economics inaugurate an anti-quantity theory tradition that Marx supported and which fed his own conception of money and credit. Here, we deal with the criticism of the assumptions of the quantity theory of money (QTM), the specifically social character of labour which creates exchange value, the distinction between the functions of money, the difference between income spending and capital advances, and the difference between simple circulation and reflux of money credit. KEYWORDS Money; quantity theory of money; reflux law; Marx; Steuart JEL CODES B21 By the names of Steuart, Steward and Denham, among others, Marx quoted the author of An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy: Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations (1767). Steuart occupied a prominent position in the Grundrisse, Contribution to the critique of political economy, Book I of Capital, and also in the manuscripts of Marx's unfinished later books. And it is also with a chapter on Steuart that Marx begins his Critical CONTACT Matari Pierre Manigat