Money and Exchange: Folktales and Reality

Whether a theoretical system is realistic or not has been a concern in economics, particularly in monetary theory, over the past century. Following John R. Hicks’ proposal that a realistic monetary theory could be constructed along an evolutionary path, starting with the workings of a real market, this volume considers whether we can look to the medieval economy as the point of departure.

Drawing upon the work of Aristotle, scholastic economists, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevon...