The idea of finite money is the root monetary liberalism & racism.

To understand the paradoxes of monetary liberalism, we need to contrast it to medieval European social ontologies, the background against which liberalism emerged. Scott Ferguson argues that in these social ontologies, mediating mechanisms that acted at a distance organized social communion. This social ontology placed the Holy Communion at the center of social life throughout Christendom, and the Eucharist presented the drama of a “boundless metaphysical center” to Christians who witnessed the sacrament of the Holy Communion, uniting them as a community.18 This ontology had a double function: it confirmed the hierarchical metaphysics of the Great Chain of Being and made the hierarchical social order appear self-evident.

Despite the isolated settlement patterns that marked medieval societies, people experienced social life as unified through a causality mediated at a distance, hierarchically, by God via the Church. According to Ferguson, the papal monetary system mirrored this metaphysics and social ontology: people viewed money as emanating from a center, as that which could mediate social communion at a distance. Money was a central governance institution that connected heterogeneous populations and institutions across space. In this monetary ontology, people imagined themselves as connected to each other through society’s center: the political institutions that issue money.

When liberalism displaced the medieval social ontology, it defined people as abstract and equal individuals. At the same time, it placed racial exclusion at the center of its social ontology, and liberal governance created and managed society based on racial identities. These governance practices promised a cohesive identity through racial forms of belonging and created exclusivist orders through the expulsion, segregation, and elimination of those deemed undesirable. While this process may seem paradoxical, scholars have emphasized that liberalism’s atomistic individuals required a form of belonging that anchored them in a social order, and race provided such an anchor.19

As part of this paradoxical logic, liberal monetary theory defined people as autonomous and equal individuals, but also provided a rationale for constituting populations along racial lines. The foundational liberal theorist of money and race, John Locke challenged hierarchical medieval ontologies and the idea that money was a governance mechanism, a link between money issuer to a population of money users. He argued that individuals pre-existed the monetary order and invented a fictitious past “before” money, and “before” society, when each individual had worked for their own account. In this situation, “it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of.” If a person in the state of nature had produced food beyond their needs, it perished, and they had deprived someone else of the land on which they had grown it.20

When people “tacitly agreed” to money use, they invented a way of storing value that enabled individual and societal enrichment: “And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life.” This step marked the birth of liberal subjects in the Lockean sense: the kind of person who consents to money use. The liberal subject was monetary from the outset, and acquisitive by definition: as soon as there was money, people would seek to increase “possessions beyond the use of his family and a plentiful supply to its consumption.”21

Inequality was inherent in this new arrangement, money, and because liberal subjects had “tacitly agreed” to it, they had also consented to inequality: “Men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor.”22 What defined these new liberal subjects was not monetary success but a commitment to money, to acquisitive practices as Locke imagined them, and to honoring the inequalities of wealth Locke considered an inevitable and just result of money. To emphasize that money (as Locke imagined it) defines liberal subjects, we call them “monetary individuals.”23