Abstract
The argument of this book has been that the writing of The Querist can be explained by showing how Berkeley deployed the evolving matrix of philosophical and semantic concepts he developed in the previous three decades to solve the class problematic he and his circle faced in 1734 – 35 and to create a strategy of capitalist development in Ireland. Al¬though commentators from Karl Marx to Jean-Joseph Goux have noted the conceptual affinity between Berkeley’s theory of money and his “idealist” philosophy, few have noted how the Querist’s form of money was over-determined by the class dynamics of early eighteenth-century Ireland.2 The problematic Berkeley and his circle faced was complex, since it involved three powerful social forces: the British state’s imperial economic policy, the Anglo-Irish gentry’s consumption im¬pulses, and the Irish Catholics’ stubborn passive refusal of work. Of the three, the last posed the greatest and most paradoxical problem. For its solution required not the all-too-familiar repressive attitude to “native” Irish workers exhibited since the days of Elizabeth, but rather their excitation and the development of their powers to labor. After all, the Cromwellian experiment in the 1650s of transforming Irish labor wholesale into chattel slave labor did not prove promising.
III. 291. Whether gold may not be compared to Sejanus’s horse, if we consider its passage through the world, and the fate of those nations which have been successively possessed thereof?
George Berkeley, The Querist
The title of this conclusion arises from a conflation of two tales told by Aulus Gellius in his The Attic Nights with the same dialectical message: What initially appears like a boon may really be a serial catastrophe. The first tale concerns a horse which belonged to a scribe named Gnaeus Seius whose lineage could be traced back to a breed of horses owned by the Thracian Diomedes. “They say that this horse was of extraordinary size, with a lofty neck, bay in colour, with thick, glossy mane, and that it was superior to all horses in other points of excellence; but that same horse, they go on to say, was of such a fate or fortune, that whoever owned and possessed it came to utter ruin, as well as his whole house, his family and all his possessions” (Gellius 1927: 265). The second tale is about “the gold of Tolusa.” Tolusa was a town in Gaul pillaged by the consul Quintus Caepio. A sack of gold was found in the town’s temple, but “whoever touched a piece of gold from that sack died a wretched and agonizing death” (Gellius 1927: 267).
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Notes
Marx wrote in 1859: “Very fittingly, it was Bishop Berkeley, the advocate of mystical idealism in English philosophy, who gave the doctrine of the nominal standard of money a theoretical twist” (Marx 1970: 78). More than a century later Goux rediscovers the connection between Berkeley’s philosophy and his theory of money. He writes: “like many English philosophers (sic), [Berkeley] (who denies the existence of matter or corporeal substance) also proposed a theory of monetary circulation. It is therefore not difficult to define the correspondence—more profound than a simple metaphorical allusion—between his philosophy and a certain type of political economy” (Goux 1990: 107).
Leyburn(1937:91).
Although it was well known that there were many wealthy Catholic merchants, there is now a growing literature on a social layer of Catholic middlemen and big farmers in the eighteen century which Whelan calls “an underground gentry,” see Whelan (1996: 3–56). For a piece of micro-history concerning Cork County Catholic gentry families that managed to keep control of land, see Cullen (1992).
The differential attention paid to Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the history of economics literature can easily be judged by looking at some standard textbooks in the field. Consider Mark Blaug’s advanced text, Blaug (1968). It has 21 index references for Hume, 13 for Locke, and 3 for Berkeley. Spiegel’s textbook, Spiegel (1983), which is more oriented to the humanities, shows a similar differential: 48 index references to Locke, 32 for Hume, and none for Berkeley.
For the posthumous professional assessment of Law see Murphy (1997) and for Berkeley see Rashid (1990).
I am using the term “postmodern” in a broad way to characterize an attitude prevalent in a range of disciplines that is skeptical of the “grand narratives” told by philosophers and social thinkers from the Enlightenment to the mid-twentieth century. It is a cluster concept that often includes other clusters, like “post-structuralism” and “deconstructionism,” I’m afraid, although the mustard seed for the cluster was definitely Lyotard’s work, The Postmodern Condition (1983). Like all skepticisms, postmodernism can easily fall into the clutches of self-reflexive contradictions.
For an introduction to the notion of textuality, see Davis (1986: sec. VIII).
For a philosophical discussion of “xenomoney,” see Rotman (1988) and for an economist’s view of “virtual money,” see Solomon (1997).
Marx (1970: 79). Two points of Marx’s critique of Berkeley are problematic. First, Marx was to realize, while working on the transformation of value into price in Capital, Vol. III, that no commodity was an accurate measure of value unless it was the result of the “average conditions of production.” Gold, silver, or other forms of specie are not necessarily such commodities. Second, Marx claimed: “Later advocates of paper money also refer expressly to the transformation of the metal coin into a token of value which is brought about by the circulation process itself. Such references occur in the works of Benjamin Franklin and Bishop Berkeley” (Marx 1970: 117–18). But Marx neglects the fact that Berkeley is quite cognizant of the possibility that paper money units can be issued in a way that does not excite industry and so inflation will follow. Berkeley gives to the managers of the National Bank the task of correlating the total monetary units with the total economic activity in a society. For an attempt to reconcile Marx’s insistence on the need for money to have a “measure of value” function in capitalism, see Harvey (1982: 292–96).
Baudrillard, A (1983). One might suspect that Jean Baudrillard’s “semiological idealism” is the contemporary analogue of Berkeley’s “idealism.” After all, does not Baudrillard write: “Gone are the referentials of production, signification, affect, substance, history, i.e., the whole equation of real contents that still gave the sign weight by anchoring it with a kind of carrying capacity, of gravity—in short, its form as representative equivalent” (Baudrillard 1988: 125)? Does Baudrillard not rediscover, sans Dieu, what Berkeley taught two hundred years before? Such anachronistic correlations pose indeterminancies, of course, but we should remember that Berkeley did insist on the different levels of power that determine the “grammars” and production of signs: from individual, social, natural, and theological. Baudrillard seems to be uninterested in these refinements.
For a powerful recent discussion of the interactions of gift and money economies in the early colonial period see Martien (1996). Was wampum money or gift? This is the source of some debate. See Woodward (1970) for historical details and see Martien (1996) for the conceptual problematics. The impact of native American political thought on the colonists is described in Weatherford (1988) and in Brandon (1986). The revival of Marcel Mauss’s gift exchange tradition in contemporary philosophy of money has much to do with Derrida’s recent work, see Derrida (1992).
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Caffentzis, C.G. (2000). Conclusion: Instructions for Dismounting from Sejanus’s Golden Horse. In: Exciting the Industry of Mankind George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 170. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9522-3_7
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