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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Sitta von Reden
Affiliation:
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
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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).
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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

Mill, J. S.Principles of Political Economy [1848]. London 1909Google Scholar

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  • Introduction
  • Sitta von Reden, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book: Money in Classical Antiquity
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511763069.003
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  • Introduction
  • Sitta von Reden, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book: Money in Classical Antiquity
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511763069.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Sitta von Reden, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany
  • Book: Money in Classical Antiquity
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511763069.003
Available formats
×