The Philosophy of Money

[quantropy]

Why I looked at this book

We tend to take for granted the idea that money represents value. The complexities of what we find important in life are all too easily reduced to a one-dimensional monetary value. You might think that economists, who should see beyond the simplistic notion of money, would lead us away from this tendency, but sometimes it looks like they are the worst offenders. I'm hoping that this book will provide some insights into how this temptation to reduce everything to monetary terms has come about, and what we can do about it. It was written over a century ago, of course, so I would see it as also being useful to counter those who see the past as a golden age and think our worship of money is a recent occurence

[quantropy]

First Impressions

The book starts with a foreward, a number of prefaces and an introduction before it gets on to what Simmel wrote, so the Kindle sample is entirely commentary on the work by other writers. This says that it is a difficult work to read, and mentions the names of Nietzsche and Foucault, which don't really recommend it to me, but this is balanced by a mention of Borges' Dreamtigers. The work is also compared to that of Marx, which again doesn't recommend it to me, but this is a single work, so it may give some indication of how those is power surpress the freedom of the poor, whilst trying to find similar analysis in the works of Marx may well be a wild goose chase.

I took a look at some of the book itself via Google preview, and although it may indeed be a struggle to read, considering that it's a work of philosophy and was written over a century ago, it doesn't look too bad. I'll have to see.