ABSTRACT
Aristotle’s writings on money and exchange have exerted a powerful influence on monetary theory. This influence has been noted by a number of historians of economic thought and scholars of classical writings. Schumpeter, for example, wrote with regard to Aristotle’s theory of money: “Whatever its shortcoming, this theory, though never unchallenged, prevailed substantially to the end of the nineteenth century and even beyond. It is the basis of the bulk of all analytical work in the field of money” (Schumpeter 1954: 63). Similarly, in a recent study of the so-called primitivist and modernist controversy, Meikle observes that
Aristotle’s theory of money substantially informed treatments of the subject into the twentieth century, and most schools of modern economic thought have had claims of Aristotelian paternity made on their behalf, including Jevonsian utility theory, mathematical economics, neoclassical economics and Marxism.
