Martin Meenagh blog

   This isn’t a blog full of philosophy. I'm not very good at that, after all. There is little else that drives proper philosophers mad as a Nartz person contextualising everything, which I do instinctively as an historian. In the time of what might come to be seen as a bitcoin bubble, however, it does make sense to think about all the people who have thought about money from high and low points. The list is illustrious—from St Paul and Geoffrey Chaucer calling the love of money the root of all evil, to Dostoyevsky, Jefferson, and Marx owing so many people money that they ended up hating it. Most critiques of money are actually critiques of the way that people behave with it and around it. This is something that David Orrell, playing to economists’ almost permanent envy of physics, has written about in his remarkable book Quantum Economics and The New Science of Money , in which he argues that money is best understood via quantum theory as something given form by what peop...

  The period after the American civil war was marked by third parties. From 1870 to 1896, Greenbackers pursuing fiat money, Farmer’s candidates associated with the Granger movement, Union Labour candidates, Liberal Republicans, and People’s Party candidates all contended with the Democratic and Republican parties for election. Though there was a clear evolutionary link between these parties, it is important that they be distinguished from each other. In addition, various reform movements swept across the plains and west, even reaching the developed urban areas of the East. These included religious revivalists, prohibitionists, bimetallists, workplace reformers, anti-corruption campaigners, and pro-democracy activists seeking womens’ suffrage and the direct election of the United States Senate, as well as wider use of referenda. The common theme uniting most of these movements and parties was a reaction against monopolies and cartels, particularly railroad trusts and Banks. Th...