Introduction to Early Modernity

In the early modern period, a number of large-scale historical transformations in the global economic order ensured that contemporaneous philosophical reflection should itself be transformed, as new questions reflecting a new reality were thrust to the center of attention. These new circumstances predictably led to significant new ideas in early modern economic theory and in turn to productive new philosophical reflections on the nature of money and of economic value. The twelve chapters in the present section focus on familiar canonical philosophers as well as some lesser-known but equally revealing authors in the early modern history of the philosophy of money. Collectively, the chapters in this section give us a remarkably faithful and rich picture of early modern philosophy in general, as a practice and as a method, which was ever focused on sundry worldly problems, many of which would not be considered “philosophical” today, while also never losing sight of the deep conceptual problems that always lie just beneath the surface of our mundane practices. On the one hand, it is hard to insist that the relation between philosophy and money in this period can be understood within a single explanatory framework or reduced to a single direction of influence. On the other hand, it is hard to deny that concrete problems of economics substantially shaped, and were shaped by, the philosophical reflections of many prominent early modern philosophers.