Abstract
ABSTRACT: Miguel Antonio Caro is known as one of the most lucid conservative thinkers of nineteenth-century Latin America. His antiliberal thinking came to define what it meant to be a Catholic man of letters in Colombia and beyond. Today, he is mostly remembered for his work on linguistics, Latin translations, and the 1886 Colombian Constitution. However, Caro was also the most recalcitrant defender of paper money of his time. In press articles, he developed what can be described as a Hispanic Catholic theory of monetary signs. While he is often portrayed as an anti-modern ideologist, the financial dimensions of his writings reveal a very different picture. Vindicating a Spanish tradition of currency debasement that went back to Alfonso the Wise, the Colombian ultramontane conciliated his traditionalism with capitalism's global accumulation drive by equating paper money with God's infinite gift: the divine grace. He hence proposed a Catholic view of capitalist modernity that rejected the "evils" of utilitarianism but embraced Colombia's agro-exporter economic model as part of God's providential design. In his political-religious project, money is thus imagined as a key tool of the Christian oikonomia , that is, God's government of earthly affairs.
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