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JOHN LOCKE AND THE POLITICS OF MONETARY DEPOLITICIZATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2018

STEFAN EICH
STEFAN EICH*
Affiliation:
Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Princeton University E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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 act of monetary depoliticization.

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Articles
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 1 - 28
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

For helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Teresa Bejan, Seyla Benhabib, David Blaazer, Christine Desan, Andrew Edwards, Bryan Garsten, Alex Gourevitch, David Grewal, Robert Hockett, Onur Ulas Ince, Desmond Jagmohan, Steven Kelts, Daniel Lee, Karuna Mantena, Emily Nacol, Isaac Nakhimovsky, Andrew Sartori, Mark Somos, and Adam Tooze. I am particularly grateful to the anonymous reviewers and Duncan Kelly for their advice.

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3 While the procedural implementation of the recoinage deviated in a number of ways from Locke's advice, his insistence on a recoinage without devaluation succeeded.

4 Locke's monetary thought, I argue below, thus constitutes an important exception to Duncan Bell's otherwise apt observation that Locke's political thought largely failed to excite prior to its mid-twentieth-century liberal refashioning.

5 As the historian Albert Feavearyear summarized in 1931, Locke's monetary opinion “has been looked back to ever since as a sterling example to be kept in mind at any time when there may be a temptation to alter the standard of the Mint.” Feavearyear, Albert, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money (Oxford, 1931), 135Google Scholar.

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45 John Locke, “Propositions Sent to the Lords Justices,” in Kelly, Locke on Money, 2: 374–80. While Locke was giving advice and writing pamphlets he still moved outside the public eye—pleading with his correspondents to keep his name out of it. “But, pray, whatever use you make of it, conceal my name.” Locke to William Molyneux, 20 November 1695, Correspondence of John Locke, 5: letter 1966, 464.

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48 Desan, Making Money, 267–74.

49 Lowndes, Report, 56.

50 In March 1695, this would have meant a devaluation of around 9 percent, but as the gap between the price of silver and the nominal value of coins widened the adjustment necessary to restore parity rose with it. By September 1695, Lowndes recommended a nominal raise of 20 percent. Lowndes, Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins, 123. Carey, “Locke's Philosophy of Money,” 58.

51 Locke, John, Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money. Wherein Mr. Lowndes's Argument for it in his late Report concerning An Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins, are particularly Examined (London, 1695)Google Scholar. A second edition with corrections appeared already on 9 January 1696. Locke later added his two earlier anonymous pamphlets from 1692 and January 1695 and published the volume as Several papers relating to money, interest and trade, &c. Writ upon several occasions, and published at different times. By John Locke Esq (London, 1696).

52 Pincus, 1688, 460; Carey, “John Locke, Money, and Credit,” 45.

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55 Ibid., 92.

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58 Christopher Wren, “Proposal,” in Li, The Great Recoinage, 183–94, at 183.

59 Ibid., 183.

60 Charles Davenant, “A memoriall concerning Creditt” (1696), in Usher, Two Manuscripts by Charles Davenant, 67–108. Crucially, however, Davenant embraced the possibilities of credit money more fully than Locke ever did. See Carey, “John Locke, Money, and Credit,” 42–4; Li, The Great Recoinage, 63.

61 Isaac Newton, “Concerning the Amendment of English Coins,” in Li, The Great Recoinage, 217–23.

62 Ibid., 217.

63 Ibid., 222.

64 A collection of the monetary views of Locke's contemporaries can be found as an appendix to Li, The Great Recoinage, 182–239. See also McCulloch, John Ramsay, ed., A Select Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on Money (London, 1856)Google Scholar.

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67 Ibid., 440. Question 14 equally resembled Locke's position: “Why hath Money been raised, or retrencht, or imbased by many wise States, and so often? Answ. When any State doth these things, they are like Bankrupt Merchants.” Ibid., 443.

68 Li, The Great Recoinage, 81–2.

69 Ibid., 82.

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71 Ibid., 202.

72 Ibid., 172.

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75 At the same time as Locke made his first serious foray into questions of money he was tasked by Ashley with writing The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Armitage, David, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32/5 (2004), 602–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Locke even prepared a new decimal currency for the colony based on the sterling penny. Kelly, “General Introduction,” 5.

76 Locke, “Some of the Consequences,” 195.

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91 Locke, Second Treatise, para. 46.

92 Ibid., para. 184.

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94 For this link between Locke's philosophies of money and his account of language in the Essay, I here draw on the work of Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, 77–123; and Carey, “Locke's Philosophy of Money,” 74–81. Both insist, rightly I think, on crucial parallels between Locke's discussion of language and money, though I diverge from them in the way I reconstruct Locke's drawing of a disanalogy between metal money and words.

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101 Ibid., 3.9.11.

102 Caffentzis, Clipped Coins, 78.

103 Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy, 289. The opacity of language and its constitutive reliance on the precarious semantic malleability of mixed modes could at best be contained by clarity and consistency. Locke, Essay, 3.9.8 and 3.11.8–9.

104 Locke, “Some of the Consequences,” 172–3.

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108 Ibid., 214.

109 Locke, “Further Considerations,” 416.

110 All creditors, Locke explained, would be “defrauded” by 20 percent of their loans. This was particularly tragic for those who had entrusted their savings to the postrevolutionary Whig state, for example by investing in the Million Lottery. Locke, “Further Considerations,” 417. That recoinage at the old rate would at the same time violate the property of debtors who had contracted their debt in clipped coins was initially not mentioned by Locke—though he added a minor concession in later printings. Locke, “Further Considerations,” 477.

111 Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling, 124.

112 Locke's pamphlet was “mightyly Commended at Courtt.” Martha Lockhart to Locke, 4 Jan. 1696, cited in Kelly, “General Introduction,” 37.

113 Newton was promoted from warden to master of the Mint in 1700, a post he held until the end of his life in 1727. For an account of the importance of capital punishment in defending the post-Recoinage monetary system, see Wennerlind, Carl, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620–1720 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 123–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Newton's initially reluctant but then meticulously earnest and devastatingly effective pursuit of counterfeiters see Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter, 107–44.

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118 As quoted in ibid., 246.

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123 Locke, “Some Considerations,” 213, 231, 336; Locke, “Further Considerations,” 418, 463–7; Locke, Short Observations on a Printed Paper, 357; as well as Locke, “Paper given to Sir William Trumbull,” in Kelly, Locke on Money, 2: 365–73, at 368; and Locke, “Propositions Sent to the Lords Justices,” 376–7.

124 Locke, “Some Considerations,” 213. The circulation of clipped coins had to be stopped, Locke wrote, “or else we are undon.” “Its continuance will unevitably ruin the nation.” Locke to Cornelius Lyde, 24 April 1696, in Correspondence of John Locke, 5: letter 2072, 616.

125 Dunn, John, “Trust,” in Dunn, The History of Political Theory and other Essays (Cambridge, 1995), 91–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dunn, Locke: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), 64. On the broader significance of trust see also Dunn, “Toleration, Trust and the Travails of Living Together Globally,” in Laszlo Kontler and Mark Somos, eds., Trust and Happiness in the History of European Political Thought (Leiden, 2017), 19–32, at 30-2.

126 “That Men should keep the Compacts, is certainly a great and undeniable Rule of Morality.” Locke, Essay, 1.3.5.

127 Locke, Second Treatise, para. 128.

128 Locke, John, Essays on the Law of Nature: The Latin Text with a Translation, Introduction and Notes, ed. Leyden, Wolfgang von (Oxford, 1954), 118–19Google Scholar; Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration: Latin and English Texts Revised and Edited with Variants and an Introduction, ed. Mario Montuori (The Hague, 1963), 92. Locke thus reinterpreted the concept of the vinculum of the Church in terms of civic trust. See Bejan, Teresa, Mere Civility (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 112–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bejan, Teresa, “John Locke on Toleration, (In)civility, and the Quest for Concord,” History of Political Thought 37/3 (2016), 556–87Google Scholar. This meant in turn that the untrustworthy had to be excluded from religious toleration. In particular atheists posed a profound danger according to Locke. See Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 52–3.

129 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 12.

130 Locke, “Some Considerations,” 329.

131 Locke, “Further Considerations,” 415.

132 Locke, “Some Considerations,” 312.

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134 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 206.

135 Desan, Making Money, 345, 73. Felix Martin has similarly credited—or rather charged—Locke with having effected “a complete reversal of perspective” that single-handedly displaced more than a millennium of monetary wisdom. Martin, Felix, Money: The Unauthorised Biography (London, 2014), 129–30Google Scholar. See also Sartori, Andrew, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History (Oakland, 2014), 7–11Google Scholar.

136 On the significance of public debt for eighteenth-century political thought see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 1–21.

137 This ambivalence toward credit is well captured by his attitude toward the Bank of England. When the bank was founded in 1694, Locke's response betrayed a characteristic double play. While he became one of its founding investors in June 1694 by investing five hundred pounds, he refused to lend the bank his voice. Bank of England Archive, 10A20/1.

138 James Hodges to Locke, 8 Feb. 1697, Correspondence of John Locke, 5: letter 2194, 777.

139 Locke, “Further Considerations,” 403–4.

140 Smith, Adam, “Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations,” in Smith, , Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. Meek, R. L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, P. G. (Oxford, 1978), 502Google Scholar [LJ (B) 242]; 101 [LJ(A)81]; Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), 43–4 [I.iv.11] and 929–32 [V.iii.59–64].

141 Smith, “Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations,” 370 [LJ (A) vi, 106].