Aristotle had argued that gold and silver had no intrinsic value in themselves, and that money therefore was just a social convention, invented by human communities to facilitate exchange. Since it had “come about by agreement, therefore it is within our power to change it or render it useless” if we all decide that that’s what we want to do.146 This position gained little traction in the materialist intellectual environment of the Axial Age, but by the later Middle Ages, it had become standard wisdom. Ghazali was among the first to embrace it. In his own way, he took it even further,
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