Daniel Carey (English, National University
of Ireland)
Locke's Money Problem: Of Species and
Specie
John Locke’s deliberations over real and nominal essences in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, and his resulting scepticism about species designation, are well known. For Locke we have no access to real essence of substances. His favourite example was gold: in this case, as with other substances, we simply draw together observed properties associated with gold (such as colour and fusibility), and for convenience adopt a name for the entity in question, without having any certainty about the consistency of its internal constitution from one sample to another. In short we have access only to the nominal essence of gold. Less familiar is an area of Locke’s philosophy in which he took a very different view of substances like gold and silver, and imposed a rigid conception of their constitution – namely in his economic writings composed in the midst of the recoinage crisis in England during the 1690s. In this context, Locke was at pains to stabilize the meaning of money, which he associated with silver and gold by weight. He defended his criterion against an alternative account proposed by others who defined money as a social convention, subject to variation according to changing economic circumstances. This intriguing divergence of perspective and strategy on Locke’s part sheds light on an underappreciated theme in his work, namely the search for stable definitions and meanings, free from social manipulation, in which social agreement provides a solid and crucial foundation rather than an illusory and artificial point of reference. Thus Locke’s familiar mode of natural history, predicated on doubts about species, tells us only part of the story of his philosophical commitments.
