Currency and politics: the Aristotelian inheritance in contractualism

Abstract

The objective of the present inquiry is to demonstrate whether the conceptualizations made regarding currency by contractarian philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Montesquieu make them direct continuators of Aristotle’s work or if, on the contrary, they distance themselves. To this end, aspects of the monetary phenomenon such as its origin, nature or essence, function, teleology, and ethics are contrasted and analyzed. Thus, the analysis developed allows us to show that modern contractualism has been more than a simple and unique canon of common thought. This entails expanding knowledge regarding it because although the different processes of monetary conceptualization do present repetitive philosophical positions in some respects, the reflective categories used by each one allowed them to create internal coherence in their respective perspectives; such notions underpin them ideas of the deliberative capacity granted to collective enterprises to transform their contexts