Historical stylizations and monetary theory

John Hicks maintained that ‘a large part of the best work on Money is topical. It has been prompted by particular episodes, by particular experiences of the writer's own time’ (Hicks, 1967a: 156). The reason for this is that the principal goal of monetary theory is not ‘general understanding’ (that is, the discovery of principles uniformly applicable in a variety of times and places) but ‘particular understanding – an understanding directed towards a particular problem, normally a problem of the time at which the work in question is written’