A “Foundation in Nature”: New Economic Criticism and the Problem of Money in 1690s England

Abstract

People in 1690s England were concerned about money. They needed to decide how they wanted to deal with problems like a degraded currency and with new realities like credit and national debt. This essay argues that many contemporary English writers addressed these problems by paying close attention to created natural world.These writers wanted their money and their economic systems more generally to have - John Locke put it - a Foundation in Nature.1 Exciting recent work that attempts to do economic history history of science has recognized something similar: in Margaret Schabas's words, until mid-nineteenth century economic theorists regarded phenomena of their discourse part of same natural world studied by natural philosophers.2 1 extend Schabas's argument to focus on what this belief meant for pragmatics of economic theorizing. English economic thinkers of 1690s approached natural world a rich source of concrete clues about proper ways to order their economies, even about God's will for human economies. Silver bullion could dramatize imperative of not meddling with value, or invite governments to take advantage of its stretchiness. Bits of metal could actually prompt human decisions.This argument - that contemporaries understood natural world a key source of information about how economy should be ordered - is unusual. A more usual story about 1690s takes period a crucial site for emergence of modern capitalist ideas, emergence of modern world itself. Important work in the new economic criticism explores a move away natural order in this period, towards an immaterial economic order. These scholars are fascinatfed] with debt and with proto-capitalist phenomena like paper money, and with processes by which economy was loosened its natural material base and built instead on imaginations and a play of signifiers. For example, with historical and theoretical nuance, James Thompson traces complex cultural processes by which eighteenth-century England shifted from realist to nominalist conceptions of [monetary] value, in a dematerialization metal to paper medium, and Sandra Sherman and Colin Nicholson investigate how resulting new sense of money's insubstantiality and instability (even fictionality) affected contemporary writers.3 The assumption guiding this work - an assumption encouraged by both liberal and Marxist narratives of modernization - is that, English economy became more modern, it increasingly lost touch with nature.4Of course, new economic critics also recognize that some contemporaries made sense of these developments by appealing to material world - land. In this, they are good students of J. G. A. Pocock's influential work on civic humanism. Pocock argues that civic humanists of Country party in early eighteenth-century England resisted corruptions of a new finance by grounding political personality in land. Land quite literally connected owner to country and its ancient customs, enabling him to contemplate public good free that corrupting mix of human fantasy, appetite, and selfinterest characteristic of emergent commercial society.5 Much recent scholarship associates Pocock's argument that civic humanism could be used as vehicle of a basically hostile perception of early modern capitalism with Isaac Kramnick's treatment of politics of nostalgia. Scholars thus recognize both a new money culture and a deeply conservative eighteenth-century reaction against it.6 Novelty, credit, City, and Daniel Defoe are on one side, and a conservative Country tradition, land, bullion, and Lord Bolingbroke, on other. Of course, best new economic critics argue that these categories were contested late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century constructs. And they recognize that at any given moment economic thought proceeded a messy mixture of the residual and the emergent. …