Abstract:
Alfred Lansburgh was a leading publicist on money in Germany during the Weimar Republic. He developed a Token Theory of Money, a nominalistic monetary theory with an endogenous quantity of money but warns of the danger of misuse. Only therefore, he combines his understanding of money as a right—as a legal claim on goods and services—with a metallistic conception of gold money. Lansburgh was misunderstood during his time, and he remains so until today. He was often described as an “orthodox gold money theorist,” but he was a passionate “token money theorist,” with many similarities e.g. to Joseph Schumpeter.
Keywords: Lansburgh, Die Bank, Inflation, Token Theory of Money, Topic Modeling
JEL-Codes: B26, B31, N24
Postprint: The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought
Link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09672567.2022.2063356