Introduction

Summary

One of the surprising phenomena in world history is the success of money. Money is more easily lost than gained; it requires a host of laws, regulations and controls to work and have value; in the form of coinage it costs something to be produced; and – above all! – it makes people dependent on anonymous authorities such as governments, federal institutions and central banks. Money destabilizes wealth and social relationships, and transforms tangible, useful property into mere options for the future. While it has created immense riches for some, and reasonable well-being for many, it has also created more extreme forms of poverty and the most spectacular economic crises the world has ever seen. Rather less surprisingly, there has been much resistance to monetization, and many political thinkers whose views were influential in other respects had serious objections to the use of money.

There is the other side of the coin. As Aristotle in his imagined history of the origins of coinage writes:

When mutual help grew stronger and people imported what they needed and exported what they had too much of, coinage came necessarily into use. For the things that people need by nature are not easily carried about, and hence men agreed to employ in their dealings with each other something which was intrinsically useful and easily applicable to the purposes of life, for example, iron, silver and the like. Of this the value was at first measured simply by size and weight, but in the process of time they put a stamp upon it to save the trouble of weighing to mark the value

(Pol. 1257a 31–8).