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.