The Price of Providence: Central Banking and the Book of Job

This paper considers an economic dimension of theodicy as a legitimating discourse: reconciling the tension between a sovereign's ultimate power and yet inability (or their ultimate benevolence and yet refusal) to intervene into a system of distribution and valuation to create justice. It begins with a theo-political reading of the Book of Job, linking the text's insistence on (divine) sovereignty as the sole basis of wisdom and justice with Modern Monetary Theory's contentions in debates over the role of the Federal Reserve. The specter of Job is raised again with Hobbes' Leviathan: in the attempted 1611 monetary renovations of James Stuart, we observe an ostensibly 'divinizing' monarch perform uncharacteristic impotence before the demands of foreign markets, in which the cost of re-capitalizing domestic market liquidity is effectively forced onto the bearers of base-metal currency.