Concept
Money
Overview
object or record accepted as payment
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Money is discussed.
It was a shrewd observation of Anacharsis the Scythian, who had never seen money in his own country, that gold and silver seemed to him of no use to the Greeks but to assist them in numeration and arithmetic. It is indeed evident that money is nothing but the representation of labour and commodities, and serves only as a method of rating or estimating them. Where coin is in greater plenty, as a greater quantity of…
David Hume, Hume's Political Discourses
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
As such a unity, however, gold has a separate existence independent of its existence in the two functions. As a measure of value it is only ideal money and ideal gold; as a mere medium of circulation it is symbolic money and symbolic gold; but in its plain metallic bodily form gold is money or money is real gold.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Money is a commodity, and its value is determined like that of other commodities, temporarily by demand and supply, permanently and on the average by cost of production.
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Among their other inventions to obtain money, the clergy had inculcated the necessity of penance as an atonement for sin; and having again introduced the practice of paying them large sums as a commutation, or species of atonement for the remission of those penances, the sins of the people, by these means, had become a revenue to the priests; and the king computed, that by this invention alone they levied more money…
David Hume, The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol. I., Part A.
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Conventional equality between things has led to the invention of money, for money is only one term in a comparison between the values of different sorts of things; and in this sense money is the real bond of society; but anything may be money; in former days it was cattle; shells are used among many tribes at the present day; Sparta used iron; Sweden, leather; while we use gold and silver. Metals, being easier to…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
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Place in the tradition
Part of Liberalism.