Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

298 DEBT
We can see the same tensions within predominant theories of money.
Aristotle had argued that gold and silver had no intrinsic value in
themselves, and that money therefore was just a social convention,
invented by human communities to facilitate exchange. Since it had
"come about by agreement, therefore it is within our power to change
it or render it useless" if we all decide that that's what we want to
do.146 This position gained little traction in the materialist intellectual
environment of the Axial Age, but by the later Middle Ages, it had
become standard wisdom. Ghazali was among the first to embrace it.
In his own way he took it even further, insisting that the fact that a
gold coin has no intrinsic value is the basis of its value as money, since
this very lack of intrinsic value is what allows it to "govern," measure,
and regulate the value of other things. But at the same time, Ghazali
denied that money was a social convention. It was given us by God.147
Ghazali was a mystic, and a political conservative, so one might
argue that he ultimately shied away from the most radical implications
of his own ideas. But one could also ask whether, in the Middle Ages,
arguing that money was an arbitrary social convention was really all
that radical a position. After all, when Christian and Chinese thinkers
insisted that it was, it was almost always as a way of saying that
money is whatever the king or the emperor wished it to be. In that
sense, Ghazali's position was perfectly consonant with the Islamic desire
to protect the market from political interference by saying that it
fell properly under the aegis of religious authorities.
I I I I I
The fact that Medieval money took such abstract, virtual formschecks,
tallies, paper money-meant that questions like these ("What
does it mean to say that money is a symbol") cut to the core of the
philosophical issues of the day. Nowhere is this so true as in the history
of the word "symbol" itself. Here we encounter some parallels so
extraordinary that they can only be described as startling.
When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions,
the term he used was symbolon-from which our own word "symbol"
is derived. Symbolon was originally the Greek word for "tally"-an
object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and
broken to record a debt. So our word "symbol" traces back originally
to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another.
This is striking enough. What's really, remarkable, though, is that the
contemporary Chinese word for "symbol," fu , or fu hao, has almost
exactly the same origin.148