money corresponds exactly to abstract number.[1] Both are entirely inorganic. The economic picture is reduced exclusively to quantities, whereas the important point about "goods" had been their quality. For the early-period peasant "his" cow is, first of all, just what it is, a unit being, and only secondarily an object of exchange; but for the economic outlook of the true townsman the only thing that exists is an abstract money-value which at the moment happens to be in the shape of a cow that can always be transformed into that of, say, a bank-note. Even so the genuine engineer sees in a famous waterfall not a unique natural spectacle, but just a calculable quantum of unexploited energy.
It is an error of all modern money-theories that they start from the value-token or even the material of the payment-medium instead of from the form of economic thought.[2] In reality, money, like number and law, is a category of thought. There is a monetary, just as there is a juristic and a mathematical and a technical, thinking of the world-around. From the sense-experience of a house we obtain quite different abstracts, according as we are mentally appraising it from the point of view of a merchant, a judge, or an engineer, and with reference to a balance-sheet, a lawsuit, or a danger of collapse. Next of kin to thinking in money, however, is mathematics. To think in terms of business is to calculate. The money-value is a numerical value measured by a unit of reckoning.[3] This exact "value-in-itself," like number-in-itself, the man of the town, the man without roots, is the first to imagine; for peasants there are only ephemeral felt values in relation to now this and now that object of exchange. What he does not use, or does not want to possess, has "no value" for him. Only in the economy-picture of the real townsman are there objective values and kinds of values which have an existence apart from his private needs, as thought-elements of a generalized validity, although in actuality every individual has his proper system of values and his proper stock of the most varied kinds of value, and feels the ruling prices of the market as "cheap" or "dear" with reference to these.[4]
Whereas the earlier mankind compares goods, and does so not by means of the reason only, the later reckons the values of wares, and does so by rigid un-
- ↑ Cf. Vol. I, Ch. II.
- ↑ Marks and dollars are no more "money" than metres and grammes are "forces." Pieces of money are real values. It is only our ignorance of Classical physics that has saved us from confusing gravitation with a pound-weight — in our mathematics, with its Classical basis, we still mix number with magnitude, and our imitation of Classical coinage has brought about the same confusion between money and pieces of money.
- ↑ Conversely, therefore, we can call the metric system (cm., g.) a valuation, and in fact all money-measures proceed from the weight theories of physics.
- ↑ Similarly all value-theories, however objective they are meant to be, are developed — and inevitably so — out of a subjective principle. That of Marx, for example, defines value in the way that promotes the interest of the manual worker, the effort of the discoverer or the organizer seeming to him, therefore, valueless. But it would be wrong to describe this as "erroneous." All these theories are "right" for their supporters and "wrong" for their opponents, and it is not reasons but life that settles whether one is a supporter or an opponent.
