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JSP Forum

Each issue of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy has a featured article that can be read in its entirety for free. "JSP Forum" is a ‘debate’ web page, hosted by the International Association for Scottish Philosophy website - www.scottishphilosophy.org  -  and based on the featured article each spring and fall. Read the article along with short comments from two or three invited experts, and responses from the author. The 'debate' continues until it is replaced by the next featured article debate.

 

FORUM 7.1

The featured article is
DAVID HUME ON MONETARY POLICY: A RETROSPECTIVE APPROACH
MARIA PIA PAGANELLI, Yeshiva University

 

Abstract

Monetary policy is a modern idea of which David Hume is generally considered a precursor. Moreover, thanks to Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas, he is often presented as one of the first and most illustrious endorser of monetarism. This paper argues against this view, and in agreement with Joseph Schumpeter, that Hume's contribution to economics, while not insignificant, cannot claim any real novelties. It offers an interpretation of Hume as a descendant of a pre-modern understanding of money rather than a forerunner of modern monetary ideas, and as a scholar exposing common ideas of his time rather than a prophet of economic theories developed centuries later, and argues that there is little in Hume that resembles today's monetary policy prescriptions.

 

Library of Scottish Philosophy

scotlibThe Library of Scottish Philosophy is a series of specially commissioned books intended to provide teachers, students and the general reader with easy and inexpensive access to both well known and less well known writers in the Scottish philosophical tradition. Published by Imprint Academic in the UK and distributed by Ingram in the USA, these paperback selections are edited and introduced by experts from Europe, Asia and America.

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