This is a slightly revised version of the purposely provocative keynote presented at the FDR library for the Levy Institute Summer Seminar on Money, Finance, and Public Policy. References have been added.

A monetary approach that combines Chartalism, Nominalism, and Command origins of monetary systems is often deemed to have emerged only recently, while the Aristotelian approach (Commodity, Metallism, and Market origins of monetary systems) is the only one that existed until the end of the...