The Lockean concept of money as the origin of the liberal myth of economics

Authors

Abstract

Within the framework of his philosophy of money Locke develops a concept of it as something that belongs to the nature of things but whose value must be politically promulgated only once and forever. In his opinion the money is gold or silver, and its order is dictated by the order of natural reason which forces men to build their institution respecting this natural norm of things with the attitude of an unbreakable promise. Beyond the fixation that arrange the value of the money to the intrinsic nature of good social order, State intervention in the creation and management of money is instead judged as essentially pernicious. This article studies the function that this peculiar concept of money plays as an early antecedent of the liberal myth of economics as a supposed scientific discipline whose epistemic object would be the market understood analogously, under the influence of the deistic ideas of the 18th century, as a product of the spontaneous and virtuous order of society.

Keywords:

Locke, money, liberalism, marginalism, gold standard