VI. The Usury Connection: How Capture Was Funded
The rhetorical victory required material support. Ideas do not propagate themselves; they require patrons, publishers, institutions, and time. The Enlightenment had all of these in abundance, and the abundance was made possible by the financial revolution that Part One described.
The traditional prohibition on usury had constrained the accumulation and deployment of capital. Lending at interest was limited, regulated, morally suspect. Wealth accumulated slowly, through production and trade, and was dissipated across generations through inheritance, charity, and the sheer friction of economic life. No one could amass the resources to reshape civilization according to a plan.
The legitimization of usury changed this calculus. Central banking created money ex nihilo. Fractional reserve lending multiplied it. National debt allowed governments to spend beyond their revenues. Patient capital could now be accumulated and deployed over decades, over generations, with compound interest working in its favor. Those who controlled credit creation could fund projects of civilizational transformation that would have been inconceivable under the old dispensation.
The Enlightenment’s patrons understood this. The salons were funded. The journals were subsidized. The academies were endowed. The chairs were established. The process was gradual, as it had to be, to avoid provoking too violent a reaction, but it was relentless. Each generation formed by Enlightenment institutions produced the teachers, publishers, and patrons of the next generation. The compound interest was intellectual as well as financial.
The tradition, operating on honest money, could not compete. Its patrons were the old aristocracy and the Church, both increasingly constrained by the new financial order. Its institutions were ancient foundations that could be infiltrated and captured. Its defenders were individual scholars, working without coordination, without resources, without a long-term strategy. They brought arguments to a financial war.
This is not to reduce the intellectual contest to mere economics. The ideas mattered; the arguments mattered; the truth mattered. But ideas need vectors, arguments need platforms, and truth needs defenders who can sustain the fight for decades across generations. The usury revolution gave the Enlightenment the resources to wage a multigenerational campaign. The tradition had no comparable resources and no strategy for acquiring them, and in both England and in France, the Church had been deprived of a significant portion of its historical property.