Tolstoy's Interpretation of Money and Property
Milivoy Stoyan Stanoyevich
9781465662286
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Assuming that our society may exist without positive laws it could also exist without money. The Russian reformer, Leo N. Tolstoy, is consistent with his doctrine of social reform. According to him enacted law is violence, private property is evil, and subsequently “money as a centre around which economic science clusters” cannot be anything else, but a medium of oppression. Describing the economic nature and offices performed by money, he dissents widely from the politico-economists and disapproves of their teachings on the same subject-matter. At the outset of the seventeenth chapter of his notable work, What Shall We Do Then, Tolstoy inquires, What is money? And further on he proceeds: “I have met educated people who asserted that money represents the labor of him who possesses it. I must confess that formerly I in some obscure manner shared this opinion. But I had to go to the bottom of what money was, and so to find this out, I turned to science. Science says that there is nothing unjust and prejudicial about money, that money is a natural condition of social life—necessary: 1. for convenience of exchange; 2. for the establishment of measures of value; 3. for saving; and 4. for payments”. Are these theories true? According to the teaching of economics they are; according to Tolstoy they are not. Many writers even those of the earliest time argued that money is a medium of exchange. The founders of classical economics, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Carey, socialist reformers, Lassalle, and Marx, all agree in the main that money is an exchangeable commodity by means of which people measure the value of other commodities. Professor Fisher shortly and precisely defines money as What is generally acceptable in exchange for goods. More acute determination of the nature of money is given by Prof. Kinley in his elaborate study on Money. According to this author no definition of medium of exchange can be framed on the basis of the material of which it is made but on the basis of its services, and its essential services are three fold: First, money is sometimes used to describe all media of exchange—gold, silver, paper, checks, bank drafts or the deposits which they represent, commercial bills of exchange, and even corporation stocks. These things all effect exchanges; in a way they all relieve the difficulties of barter. But this definition, however, is too inclusive, Prof. Kinley contends. It is inclusive because all mentioned articles do not attain the character of media of exchange because there is a demand for them for that purpose primarily. The medium of exchange includes money but its content is greater than that of money. All money can be a medium of exchange but all medium of exchange is not money.
