"
"
[Reprinted from The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, Edwin Dolan, ed.
(Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976), pp. 160-84.; The Logic of Action
One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997),
pp. 297-320. The pagination on this edition corresponds to the Logic edition.]
The Austrian theory of money virtually begins and ends with Ludwig
von Mises's monumental Theory of Money and Credit, published in
1912.1 Mises's fundamental accomplishment was to take the theory of
marginal utility, built up by Austrian economists and other marginalists
as the explanation for consumer demand and market price, and apply it
to the demand for and the value, or the price, of money. No longer did
the theory of money need to be separated from the general economic
theory of individual action and utility, of supply, demand, and price; no
longer did monetary theory have to suffer isolation in a context of
"velocities of circulation, " "price levels," and "equations of exchange."
In applying the analysis of supply and demand to money, Mises
used the Wicksteedian concept: supply is the total stock of a commodity
at any given time; and demand is the total market demand to gain and
hold cash balances, built up out of the marginal-utility rankings of units
of money on the value scales of individuals on the market. The
Wicksteedian concept is particularly appropriate to money for several
reasons: first, because the supply of money is either extremely durable in
relation to current production, as under the gold standard, or is
determined exogenously to the market by government authority; and,
second and most important, because money, uniquely among
commodities desired and demanded on the market, is acquired not to be
consumed, but to be held for later exchange. Demand-to-hold thereby
1 Ludwig von Mises, Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (1912); see the third
English edition, The Theory of Money and Credit (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1953).
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