Awake Thou Coward Majesty! Pt. 2
Awake Thou Coward Majesty Pt 2
In the first part of this letter, I evaluated Scott Ferguson’s citation to (pseudo-)Aquinas in his book Declarations of Dependence: Money, Aesthetics, and the Politics of Care. Despite Ferguson’s attempts to rediscover Thomist metaphysics as an underlaboring for chartalism, which would rescue us from the “topological rupture” of Scotus and Ockham that “denounced the necessary mediatory role played by the papal father and the Universal Church” (125) thus plunging us into a fallen world of modernity and austerity, we found that the actual theory of money attributed by the Scholastics to Aquinas in De Regimine Principium has few points of agreement with the one forwarded by the neochartalists. No matter: perhaps Ferguson would retort that his interest is in theology and metaphysics, rather than theories of money as such, and that even if actually-existing Thomism embraced a metallist theory of money, the Thomism-to-come is a chartalist one. Since an engagement along those lines would take me beyond the scope of this publication, I will instead turn to his usage of Ernst Kantorowicz’ “well-known book” The King’s Two Bodies in which “the peculiar metaphysics of the late medieval fiscal instrument have been most thoroughly explored” (119). Sadly, it seems that well-known books are not always well-read. While Ferguson claims to have metaphysical insight that “modern thought’s subsequent reduction of ontology prevented Kantorowicz from perceiving,” his reading depends upon simply failing to notice — or deliberately ignoring — what Kantorowicz actually says about money and the fisc in the cited chapter.
On Ferguson’s reading, which primarily cites the chapter on Bracton (143-92), the late-medieval jurists treated by Kantorowicz “offer a model for turning Thomas’s metaphysics of mediation toward a fresh vision of the public purse” that will “lay bare the metaphysics of haecceity that came to constrain and repress money’s boundless public center” (119-21). Key to Ferguson’s attempted recuperation of late-medieval political theology for the cause of chartalism is the notion of the “inalienability” of the “sacred fisc:” “Kantorowicz explicates how the late medieval sacralization of the fisc corresponds to a proto-modern political differentiation between a perishable corporeal ruler and the inalienable office of sovereignty: what he terms ‘the king’s two bodies.’ ‘Things pertaining the king’s peace and jurisdiction were ‘things quasi holy, res quasi sacrae, which could no more be alienated than could the res sacrae pertaining to the Church. Those things ‘quasi holy’ were ‘things public’ existing for some common utility of the realm, such as the preservation of justice and peace.’ In these juridical texts, the purse and the property of the living sovereign might be legally subjected to dispossession and estrangement. Yes the sacred fisc adhered to a suprapersonal and incorporeal sovereignty, held to be as untouchable and inalienable as the body of Christ” (120).
Ferguson, in other words, reads Kantorowicz as though the inalienability and sacredness of the fisc, as well as the figure of the sovereign as an abstract persona rather than a living person, were on the side of chartalism and the boundlessness of public spending. Unfortunately, his argument falls on the pons asinorum of what is meant by “inalienability.” Simply put, where Ferguson reads the inalienability of the fisc as referring to the inalienability of the sovereign power to spend (the state, that is, can never give up or alienate its power to create money as a sovereign liability through what the neochartalists love to call “self-imposed constraints”), what is actually meant is the inalienability of the literal money in the treasury (the hoards of “artificial wealth” that pseudo-Aquinas, as we saw last time, exhorted the ruler to accumulate). The inalienability of the sacred fisc — as becomes clear if we actually read the cited chapter on Bracton — is a constraint on, not a support for, the absolute freedom of the state’s fiscal policy space.
Let’s begin by putting Bracton — as Ferguson declines to do — in his monetary-historical context. He first appears as a justice in 1245, just two years before the monetary reform of Henry III that replaced the short-cross penny of his uncle Henry II with the new long-cross penny, redesigned in order to prevent the clipping that had plagued its predecessor. It must be noted that this was a hard-money reform. Henry III was restoring the English money to the “sterling standard” established by Henry II in 1154, which was perhaps the great hard money standard of the European middle ages: the silver content of the English penny, quite remarkably, remained almost entirely unchanged for nearly 250 years (with the notable exception of a defensive adjustment by Edward III in the 1340s) until the collapse of the dynasty with the deposition of Richard II in 1399. As Kantorowicz points out, “the development of the abstract notion of the Crown was concomitant with the development of the fisc or ‘royal desmense’ under Henry II,” precisely the originator of the hard money standard to which Bracton’s king was striving to return (187). In the midst of this reform (which provoked no small amount of hostility among the money using public, given that they were forced to pay for it) lawyers like Bracton were seeking to clarify the distinction between public and private, to draw a distinction between “matters affecting the king alone in his relations to individual subjects, and matters affecting all subjects, that is, the whole polity, the community of the realm” (172). It is in this context that Bracton developed the constellation of concepts public=sacred=fiscal=sovereign=inalienable upon which Ferguson attempts to draw. In Bracton’s own words: “A thing quasi-sacred is a thing fiscal, which cannot be given away or be sold or transferred upon another person by the Prince or ruling king; and those things make the Crown what it is, and they regard to common utility such as peace and justice” (173).
Now, why is Ferguson mistaken to see, in the notion of the quasi-sacred fisc as a matter “affecting all subjects, the whole polity, the community,” a political ontology supporting chartalism and fiscal boundlessness? After all, the neochartalists consistently have recourse to a notion of an originary, organic political community, insisting that money is something public and universal rather than private and particular. Indeed, Ferguson praises Christine Desan (whose work I will evaluate in future letters) for the “political ontology subtending her conception of the money relation” that rejects “a power struggle between distinct groups” in favor of an assumption that “money comes into being within a political community that has long been associated” (77). Class struggle and social antagonism are rejected in favor of organicism. Whatever we may think of the merits or demerits of such a politics, making this case requires a complete distortion of Kantorowicz’s argument.
As Kantorowicz makes clear, the late-medieval jurists valorized by Ferguson as proto-chartalists and soft-money theorists were in fact attempting to drive a distinction between public and private into the heart of the idea of the “fisc as the sacculus regis, ‘the king’s purse into which money was received’”(178) in order to constrain, rather than empower, the king’s arbitrary authority over spending and monetary policy. “Would the fisc then be the property of the Prince or was he merely the administrator and vicar of the fisc, assuming the privileges which derived from it, but responsible for its undiminished preservation for the benefit of his successors? And how did the fisc compare with the other appurtenances which the Prince was entitled to alienate, of which he could freely dispose?” (179). The notion that the fisc was both sacred and inalienable, then, is in fact a discourse of what we would now call “financial responsibility,” or the obligation of the king to steward the contents of the treasury, as a trustee rather than as a private proprietor, and to leave it undiminished for his successor. It was for this purpose that “Bracton distinguished between the rex regnans and the Crown” (186), creating a “parallelism of God and the fisc” that led to a “split, as yet hardly visible, between the ‘reigning king’ and the financial ‘holy district’ within the realm” (190). And in whose interests was this rhetorical cleavage mobilized? Kantorowicz leaves no room for doubt: “while the English kings reigning in the thirteenth century tried to ignore even the existence of a cleavage between themselves and the things public, the various baronial opposition groups were ready to widen that split and to pit the res publicae against the rex regnans… Within the orbit of public affairs, and especially public finances, the barons could venture to control the king, to bind him to a council of their own choice, and thus to demonstrate that things of public concern no longer touched the king alone, but ‘touched all,’ the king as well as the whole community of the realm” (190). The sacredness of the fisc, in other words, led to a situation in which “the fisc finally became a goal in itself” (189) — a formulation which is resolutely and definitively opposed to the principles of functional finance.
As this discussion makes clear, Ferguson’s attempt to recuperate the notion of a sacred fisc for the ideological underpinnings of neochartalism completely misses the mark, with the result that he champions a hard-money creditors’ ideology without realizing that this is what it is. A more serious reading of the sources should make it clear that what the neochartalists need is a theory of the fisc, not as sacred or holy, but as completely and utterly profane. Whether or not they choose to take up that task is up to them.
In my next letters, I will turn to more directly historical and less philosophical concerns, as I fact-check the claims made in an early essay of Stephanie Kelton which is foundational for the MMT school: “A Chartalist Critique of John Locke's Theory of Property, Accumulation, and Money: or, is it Moral to Trade Your Nuts for Gold?” Stay tuned. - CD
REFERENCES:
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.