Exciting the Industry of Mankind George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money

467 Pages·2000·16.702 MB·English

by  Constantine George Caffentzis (auth.)

EXCITING THE INDUSTRY OF MANKIND.
GEORGE BERKELEY'S PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
170
EXCITING THE INDUSTRY OF MANKIND
GEORGE BERKELEY'S PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY
by
CONSTANTINE GEORGE CAFFENTZIS
Founding Directors:
P. Dibont (Paris) and R.H. Popkin (Washington University, St. Louis & UCLA)
Director:
Sarah Hutton (The University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom)
Assistant-Directors: J.E. Force (Lexington); J.C. Laursen (Riverside)
Editorial Board: J.E Battail (Paris); E Duchesneau (Montreal); A. Gabbey (New York);
T. Gregory (Rome); 1.0. North (Oxford); M.J. Petry (Rotterdam); J. Popkin (Lexington);
G.A.J. Rogers (Keele); Th. Verbeek (Utrecht)
Advisory Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); B. Copenhaver (Los Angeles);
A. Crombie (Oxford); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris);
K. Hanada (Hokkaido University); W. Kirsop (Melbourne);
E. Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles);
w.
J. Malarczyk (Lublin); J. Orcibal (Paris); ROd (MUnchen); G. Rousseau (Los Angeles);
H. Rowen (Rutgers University, N.J.); J.P. Schobinger (ZUrich); J. Tans (Groningen)
CONSTANTINE GEORGE CAFFENTZIS
University of Southern Maine
EXCITING THE INDUSTRY
OF MANKIND
GEORGE BERKELEY'S
PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY
Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V.
A C.LP. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5453-1 ISBN 978-94-015-9522-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9522-3
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2000.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000
No part of the material protected by thIs copyright notIce may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever
failed. No matter. Tty again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)
Contents
Acknowledgments IX
Abbreviations Xlll
Introduction 1
Berkeley's Antagonists 6
Berkeley in Nigeria 10
Notes 12
Chapter 1. Berkeley's Monetary Education 15
Biographical Introduction 15
Note 20
Episode 1. De Motu Bubblium 21
Notes 58
Episode 2. Copper and Consent 65
Notes 78
Episode 3. Slaves, Paper, and Baptism 80
Notes 100
Chapter 2. Problematic of The Querist:
Cynical Content and the Agistment Tithe Crisis 105
The Querist: Marks of Failure 105
Ireland's Economic Crisis 107
Tithe Agistment, the Church, and the Dublin Society 113
VII
Contents
Vlll
Libertinism and the Crisis of the
Anglo-Irish Ascendancy 119
The "Tartars" Meet the "Goths" 124
Action in The Querist 135
Notes 145
Chapter 3. Prolegomena to The Querist 156
Section 1. Querying the Querist 156
Notes 175
Section 2. Defetishizing Gold 178
Notes 234
Chapter 4. The Querist's Solution 241
Section 1. Berkeley'S Second Conceptual Revolution 241
Notes 276
Section 2. Tickets, Banks, and Questions 280
Notes 309
Section 3. Molyneux Man Dances the Tarantella 314
Notes 333
Chapter 5. The Querist's Hope and Failure 337
Section 1. Passive Obedience, Theodicy,
and the Excise Crisis 337
Notes 372
Section 2. Money, Libertinism, and Failure 379
Notes 400
Conclusion: Instructions for Dismounting from
Sejanus' Golden Horse 405
Post-Modern Textuality 411
Post-Development 414
Post-Monetary 417
Notes 419
Bibliography 421
Index 440
Acknowledgments
From its inception during a New Year's Day walk on the beach in
Ibeno, Nigeria, to a final stroll on Old Orchard Beach, Maine,
diagonally across the Atlantic from Ibeno, fifteen years later, this book
has been my constant companion. It has been the source of and excuse
for many travels, adventures, diversions, and work stoppages. I will
miss it.
At this moment of parting, however, the communal aspect of
scholarly work becomes most apparent and compelling. More than a
decade of generosity and hospitality offered to me and this book by
friends and institutions across three continents demands acknowl
edgment.
When I first arrived in Nigeria I marveled at the acknowledgment
sections of university students' theses. They would often be a dozen
pages long and might evoke more than a hundred names. These
students openly acknowledged the inevitable commonism of intellectual
work and the debts it incurs. They knew that though children might
require villages for nurturance, books like this require libraries, conver
sations, plenty of time for preparing to write, long-term material
support, and endless gifts of thought from the living, the dead, and
those still to be born.
If I was to be fair to their insight, this section would be a dozen
pages longer than my Nigerian students'. But I will limit myself and
parcel out by continents my return gift of naming.
I began to write this book in Nigeria in 1985 when I was a Senior
Lecturer in the University ofCalabar's Department of Religious Studies
and Philosophy. I would like to thank Professor Maurice Ene, the Chair
IX
x Acknowledgments
of the Department then, for his concern for and interest in my work.
Some of the early ideas were discussed in graduate seminars and public
lectures in Calabar and I mention with special fondness the following
students who participated in these discussions: S. Alabi, O. Oshita, and
G.Ozumba.
While in Nigeria I also had the good fortune to be part of an exciting
intellectual circle of Nigerians and expatriates at the University of Port
Harcourt. Although this circle was broken by the Babangida govern
ment's structural adjustment policies and political repression, I would
like to express my thanks to those early commentators on the ideas of
this book by name: Pade Badru, Mac and Joyce Dixon-Fyle, Nick
Faraclas, Alamin Mazrui, Silvia Federici, and the late, beloved Patrick
Kakwenzire.
I hope this book returns to them even a pale shadow of intellectual
and political excitement that they gave me.
In the course of my research on the book I often went to Ireland and
luckily I found a much needed scholarly embrace there. After all, I was
a philosopher trying to maneuver through the turbulent waters of
eighteenth-century Irish history and economics. There were moments, I
must admit, when my confidence flagged. The most important help
came from Professor Patrick Kelly of Trinity College, Dublin, who
periodically assured me that I was sailing in the general vicinity of the
historical trade routes. Professors Tom Boylan and Pascal O'Gorman
helped to arrange a two-month stay at the University of Galway in 1993
that was crucial to the transformation of early drafts into the beginning
of a credible manuscript. I also must thank Kevin Whelan and Kevin
Barry for encouraging me to make my work more available to Irish
intellectuals.
I thank the editors of Eighteenth-Century Ireland for publishing
"Why Did Bishop Berkeley's Bank Fail?: Money and Libertinism in
Eighteenth-Century Ireland," in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, volume 12
(1997). It is an early version of Chapter 5, Section 2 of this book.
I would also like to thank Arnold Heertje, the editor of the
Vademecum that accompanied the Verlag Wirtschaft und Finanzen ein
Unternehmen der Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt GMBH (Dusseldorf)
publication of a facsimile edition of George Berkeley's The Querist, for
including my article, "Uber die Ursachen von The Querist," and making
my work available to a Germanophone audience.