Perceptive thinkers have been writing intelligently about money for at least five centuries. However, nearly all of the early thinkers developed theories designed to explain the behavior of full-bodied metallic money or the opposite extreme, fiat money issued by governments. However, late in the...

Since the reintroduction of Henry Thornton's Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) by Friedrich Hayek in 1939, Thornton has been regarded as one of the world's premier monetary theorists. In his own time, Thornton was better known for joining with...