Money and Political Economy in the Enlightenment by ed. by Daniel Carey (review)

The seven contributions to this interesting collection of essays cover a somewhat more limited range of subjects than its title indicates. All but one examine the thought of British writers, and five of the seven cover periods preceding 1755, the date of the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s article ‘Économie politique’ in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the subject of money plays a bigger part in the collection than that of political economy. It forms the core of the first essay, by Johann Sommerville, on Sir Robert Filmer’s 1653 pamphlet on usury, which, perhaps surprisingly, Filmer was willing to defend, and makes up the main body of the essays by Daniel Carey on John Locke’s philosophy of money and Charles Larkin’s examination of Charles Davenant’s monetary theory. Political economy features more prominently in Justin Champion’s discussion of land and credit in neo-Machiavellian or Commonwealth political economy, but the monetary theme dominates the essays by Patrick Kelly on George Berkeley and the idea of a national bank, and by Ryan Patrick Hanley and Maria Pia Paganelli on Adam Smith and money, mercantilism, and the system of natural liberty. Only Thomas Hopkins, in an essay on how the late eighteenth-century French politician Pierre-Louis Roederer reacted to Adam Smith’s examination of the problem of inequality, takes up some of the broader questions about the relationship between money and political economy broached by Carey in his wide-ranging Introduction to the collection. Even here, however, further questions about the relationship between money and political economy in eighteenth-century thought remain. One, raised very prominently in the works of the circle of mid-eighteenth-century French writers known as the Gournay group, centred on the question of what exactly money was supposed to add to the political economy of a state. It was possible, wrote the French political economist François Véron de Forbonnais, to imagine a political society with no money at all, but which was still able to house agriculture, trade, and industry as well as the range of legal and governmental institutions supported by a state such as France. The same idea, but with a more negative inflection, was also a feature of Locke’s much earlier Two Treatises of Government, where the advent of money became one of the reasons for establishing and maintaining governmental accountability. Interestingly, a third inflection of this idea resurfaced in Rousseau’s preference for supporting public institutions by labour services rather than monetary payments. There were, in short, aspects of the relationship between money and political economy that were, arguably, more central to eighteenth-century thought than is immediately apparent in this collection. Each contribution is absorbing in its own right, but a great deal remains to be learned by studying the broader question of the relationship between money and political economy in the eighteenth century.