Nicole Oresme has been called the most brilliant scientist of the 14th century: mathematician, musicologist, physicist, philosopher, and economist. On top of that, he was a Bishop and a theologian. His writings of money bear much in common with Carl Menger. Oresme’s treatise on money, De Moneta, provides a detailed account of the function of money and the effects of inflation.
And as Guido Hulsmann argues in The Ethics of Money Production, Oresme was the first theorist to present a fully worked out ethics of money, one that shows the sheer immorality of government monopoly over money and the social effects of debasement.
In this translation and commentary by Charles Johnson, published first in 1958, we gain new insight into this pre-Austrian thinker of the middle ages. Oresme anticipated Gresham’s Law, argued that money is not the possession of the state, and made a detailed case that money belongs to the community and individuals primarily.
This text offers the additional advantage of printing the original Latin alongside the English so that the reader can compare.
Having this book in print begins the process of restoring a high place for Oresme in the history of economic thought.
260 pages, paperback 2009
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Heroic work by the Mises Institute, as always. Many thanks to Jeff Tucker et al.
I am hoping to see more historical texts like this one get back in print. I am especially hopeful that Grice-Hutchinson’s great work on the School of Salamanca will become available once more. There is a great tradition of realist economics that has been lost but is slowly being recovered thanks to the Mises Institute (e.g., Hulsmann’s recent work on the ethics of money production).
A community is merely a collection of individuals, so money can only belong to individuals, not to “the community.”
This is as true today as it was 600 years ago. His de Moneta is a must read. I only wish Mises would publish de Moneta without the English Mint Documents and the latin as an e-book so that it would become better known.
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