The Modern Depoliticization of Money

This chapter examines John Locke's monetary thought, which had an enormous impact during the Coinage Crisis of 1695. By 1695, due to the shortage of silver, English coins in circulation lacked more than half of their original silver content. What was a nuisance at first had come to pose a serious threat to the trust and legitimacy of English money. All agreed that the whole monetary system soon threatened to come to a grinding halt, cutting off the military and bringing down the new government with it. At the height of the crisis, in December of 1695, Locke published a pamphlet calling for a full recoinage at the old value, hoping to sway public opinion and the concurrent deliberations in Parliament. Locke thought that language and money shared a pervasive instability and corruptibility. But money—unlike language—could be stabilized by tying it to the empirical concept of a substance in the form of silver or gold. This would remove money from discretionary political meddling, thereby effectively depoliticizing it.