Wealth & Money Quote by Bernard de Mandeville

Money, for Mandeville, is a costume piece: it looks like power until you tug the seam and find it’s stitched from shifting social agreement. The line about a guinea swinging from twenty pounds to a shilling isn’t antique trivia; it’s a demolition of “intrinsic value” before modern economics had the language of inflation, liquidity, or fiat. Gold and silver don’t feed you. They don’t warm a room. They don’t build a table. The real engine is “the labor of the poor,” the people whose work is quietly converted into everyone else’s comfort and then laundered into the prestige of precious metal.

The intent is sharp and faintly prosecutorial. By separating the price of money from its supposed essence, Mandeville exposes a moral misdirection: elites treat currency as if it contains value, when it actually functions as a claim ticket on other people’s time. That’s the subtext behind his insistence that it’s not the “high and low value” set on gold or silver that matters. Valuation is a political weather system; labor is the ground.

Context matters. Mandeville wrote in an England newly obsessed with credit, trade, and financial innovation, where paper promises and speculative booms were unsettling older ideas of stable worth. His broader project (best known from The Fable of the Bees) delights in puncturing respectable myths. Here, he anticipates a later, uncomfortable insight: markets can reprice symbols overnight, but society keeps running on a hierarchy of who must work so others can live “comfortably.” The sentence works because it refuses sentiment and aims at the hidden mechanism.