Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The sociology of money is a new and thriving field. Significant theoretical contributions to a sociological understanding of money were made by Marx, Simmel, and Weber, among others. While Weber focused primarily on the legal status of money – he broadly agreed with Knapp's characterization of money as a “creature of the state” – Marx and Simmel undertook extensive investigations into the nature of money as a medium. According to Marx, money is a commodity, and its quantitative relationship to other commodities – its function as a “universal measure of value” – is made possible by the amount of labor-time that it contains. This is true not only of precious metals but also of other forms of “credit” money, such as banknotes, which derive their value from a commodity such as gold. Thus, to view exchange relations merely as “monetary” relations or as a series of prices determined by supply and demand is to overlook the social relations of production – and, of course, exploitation – on which they fundamentally depend. Simmel took a quite different view of the value of money. By his reckoning, money represents an abstract idea of value that is underwritten by “society”: its value, in other words, ultimately depends on a form of trust in society that Simmel likened to “quasi-religious faith.” On the basis of the characterization, Simmel explored the roots and consequences of the development ... log in or subscribe to read full text