ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the absolutely central role that money plays in forming economic and social orders. In the course of one of the key debates in the history of political economy, the debate over the possibility of rational economic calculation under socialism, very little was written of money and its role in understanding and comparing the institutions of alternative economic systems. The argument for free banking is simply an application of the non-rationalistic epistemological argument against planning, which itself utilizes a non-rationalistic conception of money. Emerging from this non-rationalistic view of money and its institutions are new conceptions of the ideas of reason and tradition. Enlightenment philosophy has always opposed tradition in favor of reason. In this view, the function of reason is to strip away the prejudices of tradition and render all human behavior explainable by some method that is guaranteed to reach objective certainty.
