In February 1797 Britain suspended the convertibility of its currency into gold and thereby introduced fiat paper money to finance its war against revolutionary France.
This British embrace of fiat money left a lasting mark on the political and philosophical imagination of a whole generation of post-Kantian thinkers in the German lands. Whether radical Kantians, Young Romantics, or Anglophile Hanoverians, in the 1790s German philosophers began to be interested in the politics of money.
By creatively updating the classical metaphorical link between coins and words for an age of paper money, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Adam Müller, and others were able to grasp the poetic nature of modern fiat money as a circulating sign sustained by the modern state and the collective imagination of its citizens.
