Jon Cooper

“Dealing with Money” draws on archival research, technical work in monetary theory, and literature in financial, legal, and social history to present a novel explanation for the development of a radical new approach to thinking about human sociality in early seventeenth-century England. Economic theology proposed that beneath the veil of money lay a transcendent externality that contained human violence, resolved semiotic conventionality, and exhibited regular laws of motion, such that the future could be known with certainty. Rather than participating in that tradition, by explaining this development as articulating the transformation in social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, my project suggests that it is better understood as an ingenious solution to the troubling indeterminacy of monetary signification, which had posed deep political, theological, and ethical challenges since the beginning of human civilization.

In pursuit of its miraculous theodicy, economic theology posited monetary neutrality—that the nominal surface of prices mediated without influencing a deeper sphere, governed by natural laws that regulated interactions between real magnitudes like land, labor, and capital. This framework represented a thorough repudiation of a preexisting paradigm for thinking about monetary relations that developed in the High Middle Ages, where money was understood as a symbolic instrument that had to be used properly to ensure proportional reciprocity. According to medieval moralists, in order for money to be able to commensurate between other things, it was necessary for those who used it to ensure that it always remained self-identical. Jurists and theologians therefore implored rulers to resist debasement and insisted on the absolute prohibition of usury.

My dissertation charts how this conceptual structure began to unravel from the fourteenth century, before it began to seem completely untenable amid the unprecedented monetary, commercial, and financial crises that afflicted England from the mid-sixteenth century. Debasement, expanding credit markets, and the subjection of international trade to a regime of floating exchange rates forced commentators to confront a profound new question. Inspired by currents in reformed and late-humanist thought, they began to ask what could explain, and thereby promise to stabilize, the pricing of money in terms of itself. Paradoxically, the most persuasive way of answering this question was to abstract away from money entirely—to explain interest and exchange rates as indexing a deeper, non-monetary reality, which later became known as the laws of value and capital.