Roberto Marchionatti

The Theory of Imaginary Money from Charlemagne to the French Revolution

If one reads the books on monetary subjects that were written in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, one frequently encounters the concept of ‘imaginary money’. Other terms used are ‘ideal money’, ‘political money’, moneta numeraria, ‘money of account’. What these terms meant was not very clear even to contemporaries. The most authoritative writer among the historians of French monetary vicissitudes, Francois Le Blanc, resigned himself to defining as imaginary any kind of money which, ‘properly speaking, is but a collective term comprising a certain number of real moneys’. The imaginary money which almost everywhere was called ‘pound’ or an equivalent term such as ‘livre’, ‘lira’, ‘pond’, was, in Le Blanc’s words, ‘never changing in value; in fact, we have used it since the time of Charlemagne, and it has always been worth 20 sous (shillings), and each sou, 12 deniers (pence)’.1 It is called ‘imaginary’ because of the fact that it has never been coined; ‘because we have never had a real specie which has consistently been worth 20 sous or one worth 12 deniers’. Although from time immemorial men have neither seen nor touched any imaginary money, nevertheless, in the remote past it was something real, ‘since if we go back to the time when in France people began to count in pounds, shillings, and pence, we shall find that these imaginary moneys owe their origin to a real thing’.

Know before Legislating

‘The solution is too long in coming’; ‘now that the problem has been raised, it must be solved’; ‘the matter is urgent, it must be addressed without further delay’. Those who read these and similar comments might well think: why are the government, the parliament, the minister responsible, so slow to act? These hasty people don’t stop to ask: is this really the problem and not just one of the many? How is it that every day there are so many different urgent problems, whose solution cannot be put off without harm, indeed without serious harm? Why is the list of urgent problems so long and the list of documents in which their substance is clearly explained so short? How can we legislate without knowing?

Contribution to the Quest for an ‘Optimal Tax’

This study follows several others of mine, brought forth from time to time in obedience to the need the scholar occasionally feels to put his thoughts on paper even before they have been distilled into a final form, compact and consistent in all its parts.

The Instruments of the Federal Administration

The federation would be an empty name, would amount to a useless and damaging league of nations, if it did not have a force of its own, capable of defending federal territory against external aggressions and preventing wars among its members.

My Plan is not Keynes’s

Keynes’s ‘essay’ (saggio) … I use this word not having found a better one for what in English would be a tract or in French a pamphlet. But in reality ‘essay’ does not convey the concept of a piece penned for the occasion, of a weapon of political and economic contest, which is a feature of the short vehement writings in which practical battles were conducted or theoretical principles set out. The literature of economics, the great literature of economics is typically made up of essays. If someone were to compile a dictionary of economic discoveries, giving the sources in which they were first enounced, they would cite many more short essays than large books. The word libello was once used, very appropriately, for this kind of short and important writings; but this is no longer possible owing to the way it has been misused.

Lectures on the Market

Have you ever been in a country town on the day of a fair? Amidst the clamour of the children, the elbowing of the peasants, men and women, who want to get close to the stalls where cloth, clothing, footwear, etc., are being sold, to see, to compare, to touch, and the cries of the vendors, who want to persuade you that their goods are the best, the only ones that you will tire of wearing before they wear out, the ones that are a real gift considering the little money you will have to spend to buy them? That fair is a market, that is to say a place where on a fixed day, known in the surrounding towns, hundreds of sellers’ trucks, carts and pushcarts come together, laden with goods, with the most diverse things, from clothes to shoes, from kitchen casseroles to ploughshares, from sheets to pillowslips, from odds and ends for children to gifts for fiancees. Everything is offered at the fair, and there are always many who offer the same thing. And from every direction, from the circle of villages and farmhouses around the large town, where there are squares and inns that can put up and feed so many people, thousands, multitudes of buyers converge to acquire the things they lack. The crowd of buyers and sellers is especially large at the Easter and All Saints’ Day fairs. The buyers come in swarms, knowing that where there is a large gathering it is always easier to find what one needs, and to find it at the best price.

The Economic Tasks of the Federation

From an economic point of view, European federation means the assignment to the federal authority of some economic tasks defined on an exclusive basis in the document constituting the federation, defined, that is, in such a way that the federal authority has the power to attend only to the tasks included in the list, all the other tasks not on the list remaining within the competence of the individual federated states. It is useful, therefore, with a view to attenuating the suspicions and fears of large bodies of opinion or of strong interest groups, to reduce the number of tasks assigned to the federation at the beginning to the indispensable minimum. With time, experience and growing popular consensus will allow the list of tasks to be expanded, in accordance with the formalities prescribed for the approval of amendments to the federal constitution; formalities which will certainly not be easy to observe: a special majority, greater than half the votes of the two chambers of the federal parliament, a special majority of the federated states expressed through an ad hoc procedure. If the obstacles to approval of the amendments are overcome, this will be because the expansion of the tasks of the federal authority will have become part of the consciousness of the great majority of the citizens of the federation and of most of the federated states, persuaded of the benefits obtained in the light of experience.

The Concluding Remarks of the Governor of the Bank of Italy for the year 1946

During his tenure as Governor of the Bank of Italy Einaudi transformed the Annual Report of the Bank into an exercise quite different from a mere description of the activities of the Bank. It became a full account and analysis of economic transformation, and the Final Considerations, read aloud in the presence of all the political and economic establishment of the country, became a permanent occasion for complete reassessments of governmental economic policy by an independent technical body. In 1947, Einaudi described a country emerging defeated from World War, trying to recover confiscated resources and occupied territories, dealing with reconstruction but burdened by debt, deficit and an inflated paper circulation. Einaudi’s analysis of the difficulties of reconstruction and of the growing inflation anticipated a vigorous shift in economic policy. Only a few months later Einaudi introduced, as budget minister, a plan to combat inflation through both a banking restriction and budget cuts, and successfully implemented it.

Why we need a European Economic Federation

Alongside the tenacity with which peoples, small and large, yearn to conserve and perfect their own spiritual, cultural and political autonomy, we have the opposite tendency of the economy towards unity, not merely of large areas, but of the entire world. Not just small states but large ones too have become economically anachronistic and absurd. The modern states, those of 1914 and 1939, are just as absurd today as were the many communal republics of central and northern Italy at the end of fourteenth century, or the small Italian principalities at the close of the fifteenth century, or the several tiny states into which Italy was fragmented in 1859. In the past, roads, gunpowder, the discovery of America, the growth in literary and epistolary communications had rendered obvious the incongruence of closed borders between city and city, principality and principality, state and state. People yearned to move about freely, to contract and trade unhindered; they could no longer remain shut inside the old, cramped borders. A formula for mediation between small homelands and great territories was not found and the small homelands were submerged. In his large volume on the question of Italian unity, [Raffaele] Ciasca gathered thousands of eyewitness accounts of the fervour with which, between 1800 and 1859, the needs pushing toward Italian unification were expounded, debated and championed.