Awake Thou Coward Majesty! Pt. 1
In this inaugural letter from “Trial of the Pyx,” I will be tracking down citations to Thomas Aquinas and Ernst Kantorowicz found in Scott Ferguson’s 2018 book, Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care. Ferguson, an assistant professor at University of South Florida with a background in film studies, is perhaps leading the charge to plant the flag of MMT in the academic humanities by making the chartalist story about money the basis of a political philosophy and social critique. This is an admirable goal… but one which would have been better served by a more careful attention to his own archive. As it is, he is careless when it comes to his presentation of Aquinas, and, in addition, he gets Kantorowicz quite backwards. In so doing, he presents a problem as though it were a solution. In pt 1 of this letter, I will evaluate the citation to Aquinas, and in pt 2 (coming soon) I will investigate his invocation of Kantorowicz.
The basic thrust of Ferguson’s book is to draw on Thomism and the high medieval papacy as a model for the political philosophy of MMT. This is, already, strange enough in itself: why should an economic theory stressing the absolute independence of domestic monetary policy turn to a supranational creditors organization, whose very raison d’être is the control and restraint of sovereign rulers, as its political model? The only way that I can make sense of this move is to conclude that Ferguson sees the US empire, and its dollar, as the rightful heir of the Universal Church. Is this a new theory of the translatio imperii? A postmodern apology for the Donation of Constantine? Whatever the case may be, and whatever the merits of this view, I will restrain further commentary to my stated scope: the evaluation of citations.
First, we must consider Ferguson’s appeal to Thomas Aquinas. “Of all the scholastic theologians,” writes Ferguson, Aquinas “went furthest to comprehend the expansive unity of social existence during the High Middle Ages,” thus producing what Ferguson, citing Kantorowicz, identifies as the “fiscal theology” of the late medieval period. Then, according to Ferguson’s lapsarian intellectual history, Thomism “came under attack” by “Franciscan theologians” and “Italian humanists” who, by “subordinating mediation to haecceicity… banished money’s boundless public center,” resulting in a “valorization of austerity” (114-124). The argument, beneath its rhetorical flourishes, is simple: once upon a time, in the good old days of Scholastic philosophy and the imperial papacy, we lived in an organic social community in which money itself emanated from the boundlessness of God as the ontological center of reality. Then, the Franciscans and the humanists invented modernity, convinced everyone that they were an atomized individual, and now we are so confused about things that we think the government can run out of money. Fine. But what does Thomas Aquinas actually say about monetary sovereignty?
In fact, Thomas Aquinas didn’t say much at all about the power of the ruler over his coinage. Summa Theologica, while it has a lot to say about private monetary relations, primarily related to the condemnation of interest, does not discuss the ruler’s power over the monetary medium itself, whose existence is taken for granted: that text, though it frequently employs the figure of the ruler’s image on a coin as a metaphor, does not address our topic directly (where he does discuss money directly, he makes claims that the MMT theorists are otherwise at pains to refute, such as the notion, deriving from Aristotle, that money was spontaneously invented to facilitate trade.) As it turns out, De Regimine Principium, the text in which Aquinas is reported to make a claim for the ruler’s power over the coin of the realm, is regarded by modern scholarship as pseudepigraphal: it was probably, in fact, written by a man named Ptolemy of Lucca. No matter: what does pseudo-Aquinas have to say about monetary sovereignty?
In the literature, pseudo-Aquinas’s views on the coinage are generally presented with reference to the opening paragraph of Book II, Chapter 13, at which he bases his argument on a reference to Mark 12:17: “Render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s.” Since this is often taken, in the monetary history literature, as an expression of a chartalist theory of money, which was then displaced as an orthodoxy by the metallist theory associated with Nicolas de Oresme in the 15th century (see, for example, Spufford 301-8), Ferguson’s presentation of a “fall” into metallist and austerian theories from a previously dominant chartalism follows a standard reading. The actual text of pseudo-Aquinas, however, is very far from advocating either the “boundlessness” of the king’s treasury or his arbitrary power over the precious metal content of his coinage (nor does it consider the usage of pure token money as a possibility). While pseudo-Aquinas admits that the ruler has a monopoly right to endow coinage with its legal stamp, his rhetorical thrust goes in the other direction, cautioning rulers against slighting both their subjects and God himself with their meddling: “Although by right it is licit for a ruler to make demands about how the coinage is stamped, any ruler or king ought to be moderate in changing or in decreasing the weight or the metal. This would work to the people's detriment, since money should be the measure of things, as I said above, but the more the money or the coinage is changed the more the value or the weight changes. In Proverbs it is written that this displeases God: ‘Both differing weights and values are abominable before God’” (II.13.8). Following this assertion, moreover, we receive an anecdote in which the pope is figured as a outspoken advocate of hard money: “Pope Innocent criticized the king of Aragon quite severely for this because he had changed the coinage by diminishing it to the detriment of his people, so since the son had obliged himself by an oath to preserve the said money, Innocent absolved him from the oath and mandated that he restore the money to its former state’” (the wording is confusing: Innocent is freeing the son from his oath to uphold his father’s coinage, which had turned out to be debased, so that the son could restore it to the true, heavier standard).
Pseudo-Aquinas is also quite insistent that the intrinsic value of money matters a lot: if this is a chartalist theory, it is a highly qualified one. At II.14.2, for example, he points out that “a coin, although it is a measure and an instrument in exchanges, can be something in itself. If it is melted it still will be something, namely gold or silver.” But even more crucially, he devotes an entire chapter (prior to treating the topic of coinage directly) to the king’s need to hoard stores of precious metal. At II.7.1 he writes: “A king also needs artificial riches, such as gold, silver, other metals, and the coins minted from them, to defend his government. If we suppose that by nature association is needed to constitute a rule or polity, and, consequently, a king or other lord to govern the multitude, we must also accept any consequences about the treasury that derive inevitably from this supposition, such as that a king cannot exercise his government adequately and favorably without gold, silver, and the coins minted from them.” Pseudo-Aquinas is clear that what he means by this is that the king must accumulate a literal store of physical metal: “a treasury containing artificial riches,” II.8.5. It is difficult to see why pseudo-Aquinas should emphasize the need to accumulate money reserves, if he believed in Ferguson’s notion of the boundless public fiscal center. There is, moreover, no room in his theory for a truly chartalist conception of money as essentially a sovereign liability: “Borrowing for the expenses of the king or kingdom is foul and greatly detracts from the subjects' reverence for what is regal. Moreover, when a king is subjected to a loan, the lords restrain him, with the result that his subjects or others may make undue exactions against the kingdom and weaken its state” (II.8.8). While this may accord with the neochartalists antipathy towards public creditors (although not with their assertions that such creditors — “bond vigilantes” — are actually impotent), it does not leave much room for their theory of money as such. On the balance, then, while Pseudo-Aquinas might offer some useful turns of phrase for a cherry-picking neochartalist, his overall view is ultimately grounded in a substantialist notion of money as a quantity of physical metal.
In part 2 of this letter, I will move on to investigate the implications of this for Ferguson’s reading of Kantorowicz. Stay tuned. -CD
REFERENCES:
Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa Theologica.” Http://Www.Ccel.Org/Ccel/Aquinas/Summa.Html.
Ferguson, Scott. Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Ptolemy of Lucca, and Thomas Aquinas. On The Government of Rulers: De Regimine Principum. Translated by James M. Blythe. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: PENN, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Spufford, Peter. Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.