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
Medina-Labayru, C. (2024). The Lockean concept of money as the origin of the liberal myth of economics. Cinta De Moebio. Revista De Epistemología De Ciencias Sociales, (79), pp. 1–12. Retrieved from https://rchdt.uchile.cl/index.php/CDM/article/view/74473