Shortly after the declaration of independence, the Liberian government established the Liberian dollar as its national currency. According to President Joseph J. Roberts, it was intended to both promote commerce and demonstrate the sovereignty of the Liberian state. The first coins were minted in England, with the financial backing of a British banker and abolitionist, as the Liberian state did not then have the means to fund their minting itself. These token coins were later supplemented with paper money printed in Monrovia. The Liberian dollar was an unbacked paper currency. It was initially valued at par with the US dollar but quickly depreciated as the Liberian government turned to the printing press during repeated fiscal crises in the decades after 1847. This chapter chronicles the Liberian government’s efforts to sustain the value of its currency, the adoption by the turn of the century of British sterling as the primary medium of exchange, followed by the replacement of British currency by the US dollar in 1943. The case of Liberia illustrates that formal monetary sovereignty may have little significance for governments lacking the resources and capacity to sustain the value of their currency, which may force them to adopt others to sustain their trade and public finances.

Kant’s preliminary notes for the Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Doctrine of Right offer insight into his claims in the published text and his attempt to differentiate the legislative and executive moments of volition. In these notes Kant addresses the distinction between the will and the power of choice as well as the definition and scope of freedom of the power of choice. However, rather than settle the question of whether the capacity to choose to transgress the moral law belongs to freedom of the will, several of Kant’s statements seem to contradict. On the one hand, he claims that the free power of choice can be determined only by the law of the subject’s own causality and that there is no unlawful volition. On the other hand, he asserts that the power of choice is free to observe or transgress the law’s command. While Kant claims that only the power of choice, not the will, can be considered free, he also states that the will is free in another sense insofar as it is lawgiving. The context of these apparently conflicting claims suggest a nuanced account of freedom of the will and offer material for further scholarship.