LOCKE ON MONEY AND TRUST: BETWEEN FIDES , TRUSTEESHIP, AND CONFIDENCE

This paper reinterprets the money–trust nexus in John Locke by distinguishing three rationalities of trust at work across his moral, political, and monetary writings: fides, trusteeship (fiduciary power), and confidence. Against England’s monetary turmoil of the 1690s, it reads Locke’s monetary interventions as attempts to secure public faith and contractual stability amid monetary deterioration and contested proposals to “raise” money’s value. Fides underwrites promising and moral intelligibility of conventional signs yet remains too fragile to sustain monetary order without reliable sanctions. Trusteeship explains why fiduciary power can secure coining, standard maintenance, and the punishment of monetary crime but cannot create value by decree. Finally, the paper tackles the puzzle of “intrinsick value” by reading Locke’s universal “consent of mankind” as confidence : an impersonal trust in the persistence of a social convention, neither natural essence nor sovereign fiat.