Money is funny, the old saying goes, both in the cognitive puzzles it generates and the motivational extremes of human behavior it causes. The anti-liberal theorist Karl Marx ascribed these words to the liberal politician William Gladstone: “Even love has not turned more men into fools than has meditation upon the nature of money.”

In The Ontology and Function of Money: The Philosophical Fundamentals of Monetary Institutions, Dr. Leonidas Zelmanovitz has ambitious plans. He seems to have read everything important related to money by philosophers, economists, historians, and sociologists. To give a sense of Zelmanovitz’s range of classic and contemporary concerns, he is most engaged with the arguments of S. Herbert Frankel, Nicolas Oresme, Georg Simmel, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Vera Smith, and, more recently, those of Leland Yeager, David Glasner, Tyler Cowen, Lawrence White, George Selgin, and Randall Krozner. And he brings to the issues a cosmopolitan experience—Zelmanovitz is a Brazilian businessman with a Ph.D. from a university in Spain who now works at the Liberty Fund of Indianapolis. Especially relevant are his direct experiences of living through Brazil’s monetary disasters in the 1980s and 1990s as well as the U.S. financial crisis of late 2007 to 2009.