Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by John Laughland

Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money, by James Buchan (Farrar, 320 pp., $25)

The History of Money, by Jack Weatherford (Crown, 293 pp., $25)

Mr. Laughland is the author of The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea.

IF ONE thing proves the conservative conviction that established institutions are usually wiser than individuals, but that those institutions represent a delicate balance which rulers upset at society's peril, it is the history of money.

Edmund Burke's prescience in 1790 in saying that the French Revolution would lead to terror was probably thanks to his acute disgust at the revolutionaries' monetary policy. They created the assignat in December 1789, a currency he scorned as "depreciated paper which is stamped with the indelible mark of sacrilege," for it was supposedly based on the value of lands seized from the Church and the Crown. Burke saw what Goethe was later to show in Faust II, when Mephistopheles persuades the Emperor to issue a paper currency: that to debase money and the law which underpins it is a devilish act which violates the sacredness of the social order itself. As Burke predicted, the assignat was indeed the handmaiden of terror, penury, and regicide -- tens of billions of livres ran off the printing presses, which worked as frenetically as the guillotine --until the currency's short and ugly life came to an end when a great pile of the worthless notes was ceremonially immolated on the Place Vendome on February 19, 1796.

Like Burke, James Buchan is a magnificent writer and a man of strong feelings. His Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money is in many ways a brilliant book, filled with horror at money's brutal capacity to rend society asunder. "This yellow slave," Buchan quotes Timon of Athens, "will knit and break religions; bless th'accurs'd;/Make the hoar leprosy ador'd; place thieves,/And give them title, knee, and approbation/With senators on the bench." Money is promiscuous -- "it will just as happily serve a tyranny as guarantee liberty" -- and immoral. Economics is a pseudoscience which has degraded into futile and pettifogging scholasticism, as a result of which, says Buchan, "the world is reduced to a scorching slum, its women to whores, its men to murderers."

Buchan's work benefits from his literary talent and historical sensitivity. The vignettes are wonderful: his trip to the Italian hill town where double-entry bookkeeping was invented ("You begin with the name of God," instructed Luca Pacioli); his magnificent tableau of Amsterdam almost literally floating in the sea after the dykes were breached in order to defend the city's banks against the French in 1671; and his terrifying description of Rembrandt's Judas, Repentant, Returning the Pieces of Silver.

Indeed, writes Buchan, it is not just society that money destroys: it even destroyed the Son of God. As Buchan shows, so many of the key events in the Gospels are monetary ones -- from the nativity in Bethlehem because Mary and Joseph were on their way to Nazareth to register for tax purposes, to Christ's betrayal for a bag of coins. Indeed, asks Buchan, did Jesus refuse to pay tribute to the Temple tribute-collectors at Caparnaum, and did he chase out the money changers in Jerusalem (who were on the steps of the Temple because money, levied from worshippers, was kept in it), precisely because he foresaw what use the money would be put to? Judas was paid off by the chief priests, after all.

At bottom, however, Buchan is deeply wrong. So convinced is he that money is diabolic that he even accuses Jesus Christ of digging his own doctrinal grave by retorting to the Pharisees, who presented him with a Roman coin and asked whether tax should be paid, "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's." Buchan thinks Jesus sold the pass here by opening up a space for the reign of Mammon which, like a ghastly cuckoo, has now usurped the place of Christianity entirely. Adam Smith is the Antichrist, but his letters of credit are signed "J.C."

Buchan is wrong because in the beauty of Jesus' reply here lies the key to crucial elements of Western civilization. In that one remark, Jesus legitimized the existence of states -- not "the economy," as Buchan thinks, for Caesar's head symbolizes the law. The authority of states should be subordinate to, but not engulfed by, the spiritual realm: in other words, the state and its law should be modest and prudent, but grounded in transcendent morality, and money should repose on that law. Religion, meanwhile, is universal and applies to all mankind regardless of race or creed; it is also at least partly a matter of private conscience. Nor can money be all bad if, at the deepest level of Christian metaphysics, the relationship between man and God is described in the language of monetary transaction: Christ the Redeemer told us to pray to God to "forgive us our debts."

Because Buchan does not share this analysis, his journey through the gallery of monetary horrors leaves him lunging at imaginary and real monsters alike. He combines what appears to be admirable rigor --his brilliant analysis of The Merchant of Venice leads to such stabbing phrases as, "Like Shylock, J. S. Mill and Jevons [the economist] could not distinguish money and humanity" -- with a strange admiration for the abominable John Law, the Scottish murderer and con-man who enthralled the French kings and bankrupted that country in 1720. And he fails to grasp what is truly ghastly about Keynes's remark, "In the long run we are all dead," blaming it on the influence of "economics," whereas the simple truth is that Keynes's vision was exceptionally inhuman. That is why he was as happy to write in the service of Soviet Communism in the 1920s, as he was to preface the 1936 German translation of his General Theory with the cool admission that his policies were easier to apply in a totalitarian state than in a liberal economy.