Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money / Edition 1

by Gianfranco Poggi

Overview

A major representative of the German sociological tradition, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) has influenced social thinkers ranging from the Chicago School to Walter Benjamin. His magnum opus, The Philosophy of Money, published in 1900, is nevertheless a difficult book that has daunted many would-be readers. Gianfranco Poggi makes this important work accessible to a broader range of scholars and students, offering a compact and systematically organized presentation of its main arguments.

Simmel's insights about money are as valid today as they were a hundred years ago. Poggi provides a sort of reader's manual to Simmel's work, deepening the reader's understanding of money while at the same time offering a new appreciation of the originality of Simmel's social theory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520075719
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/03/1993
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gianfranco Poggi is W. R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

Money and the Modern Mind

Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

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By Gianfranco Poggi

University of California Press

Copyright © 1993 Gianfranco Poggi
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-07571-4

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Chapter One

The Context

This is a book about a book, Georg Simmel's philosophie des Geldes (PdG), first published in Berlin in 1900. I have undertaken to write about it at some length because, almost a century after it appeared, and several years after the publication of an excellent English translation (The Philosophy of Money), Philosophie des Geldes seems to me both significant enough and difficult enough to warrant an attempt to make it more accessible to readers. The attempt consists in selecting for attention some of the book's themes and in mapping out what I hope to be a manageable and rewarding reading itinerary through its lengthy, involved, and sometimes arduous argument.

Thus, I am discussing The Philosophy of Money in this book primarily because of its enduring significance as a text which provides a number of (as it seems to me) persistently valid or at any rate highly thought-provoking insights into a wide range of social phenomena. In doing this I am adopting what is sometimes called a "presentist" approach, not one which seeks primarily to locate and understand historically the text in question. That is, questions concerning the circumstances under which and the process through which Simmel produced PdG, the writings by others he may have used either as a source for his own argument or as a foil for it, the extent to which his ideas differed from what other authors of his own time were saying about money or about related phenomena-none of these questions, significant as they may be, are systematically entertained in what follows.

This chapter and the next, however, do address the fact that the book I discuss from a "presentist" viewpoint was written at a particular time and in a particular place and constitutes a significant moment in the personal and intellectual biography of its author. They do so by outlining first the broader social, political, and intellectual context of the genesis of PdG, and then the social and intellectual location of its author within that context.

I

Let us consider, then, the German Empire at the turn of the century-the high point of what is called the Wilhelmine era. The reference is, of course, to the emperor himself, Wilhelm II (1859-1941; regnavit, 1888-1918). Wilhelm, however, was also (indeed, in the first place) the king of Prussia. For the German Empire, at the time PdG appeared, had been in existence for barely three decades; whereas the Hohenzollern dynasty, of which Wilhelm was the head, had for as many centuries ruled Prussia and other eastern German lands as kings, and earlier yet as dukes. Besides, the whole German polity was strongly characterized, in its official constitution as well as through less visible but equally significant arrangements, by the dominant position Prussia held among the empire's component units (Bavaria, Württenberg, etc.).

Prussia, the easternmost component of the empire (though in 1815 the Rhineland had been added to its territories), had long been the largest and most powerful German state outside the Habsburg Empire. To build it up and maintain it in a region of Europe with contested boundaries, marked for centuries by ethnic, linguistic, and religious conflicts and by strong political rivalries, the Hohenzollerns had had to engage in the most exacting kind of power politics. Prussia had often had to deal, in complex diplomatic combinations and dangerous military confrontations, with bigger, better established, and wealthier European powers.

The Hohenzollerns' success, secured in spite of a number of setbacks, had been due largely to the distinctively authoritarian cast of the political structure they had created in the heartland of their territories (Brandenburg and Prussia) and then progressively extended to their further acquisitions. That structure concentrated all critical decisional faculties in the person of the ruling dynast, who exercised them without encountering the opposition or requiring the concurrence of other, independent powers, but nonetheless with the assistance of a relatively large body of politically committed nobles, the Junkers.

At that time most other German lands outside the Habsburg empire were fragmented into a large number of petty jurisdictions, often no bigger than a smallish town; and even the rulers of larger territories, in conducting political business, had to take into account the privileges of diverse autonomous bodies. Towns, villages, and corporations of various kinds rested their liberties, and their entitlements to intervene to a greater or lesser extent in the process of rule, on traditions evolved over the centuries in what had long been relatively wealthy and well-populated lands that possessed sizeable groups of literate burghers capable of forming and expressing opinions and of demanding their legitimate entitlements.

The Hohenzollerns' large and growing territories, however, were mostly located in what would now be called an "underdeveloped" region of Europe, lying east of the Elbe. The region had few large towns, which were mainly of recent origins, and most of it was sparsely settled by a dependent (and until the early nineteenth century enserfed) rural population, mostly grouped into large estates practicing relatively primitive forms of agriculture under the control and for the primary benefit of the highly privileged, landowning Junkers. Together, the ruling Hohenzollern dynasts and the Junkers ran those territories in the manner they thought was required by their prevailing social, economic, and cultural "underdevelopment" and by the threats and opportunities of power politics.

The Hohenzollern territories could remain politically unified, and grow, only if the state was militarily strong enough to withstand the opposition and the challenge of even larger, wealthier, and more established powers to the east, south, and west. Given the poverty of the region, the Prussian state could afford a strong army only if it constructed effective fiscal and administrative machinery for extracting resources from the population and deploying them for its own purposes. The Junkers, as a class, were central to this design. It fell upon them to lead the army and to construct and operate the fiscal and administrative systems necessary to build up and equip that army, as well as to secure orderly compliance from and maintain discipline among the population at large. This last task they performed in two capacities: as trained, hierarchically empowered and supervised functionaries running a sophisticated protobureaucratic system of offices that placed a premium on intellectual competence and on devotion to duty; and as landlords vested with wide judicial and police powers in managing the dependents of their estates. The army, under the direct command of the supreme ruler, was the pivot of Prussia's whole political existence and thus of its social life at large. It absorbed the great bulk of public resources, instilled in the subject population (until some time in the nineteenth century it would have been inappropriate to call it a "citizenry") a strong disposition toward unquestioning obedience, and trained into the members of its officer corps distinctive habits of selfless devotion to the public cause (embodied in the Hohenzollern sovereign) and of harsh, commandeering superiority toward everybody else. All other political arrangements-including, until 1918, an electoral system that vastly overrepresented the Junker element-were so designed as to assert the undisputed primacy of military considerations in the conduct of public affairs and to enforce the sovereign's personal will in matters of policy.

On that very account, Prussia was something of a constitutional archaism in nineteenth-century Europe, where most powers sought, in different ways and with different tempos, to modernize their polities. In other Western countries, that is, an increasingly enfranchised citizenry, mostly belonging to a single nationality, was considered the key political constituency, and complex constitutional arrangements gave some leverage on policy to public opinion and to freely formed partisan alignments. In fact, Prussia appeared archaic even in comparison with other German, non- Habsburg lands, where the middle classes were having some success with similar forms of political modernization and were seeking to promote the formation "from below," through the pressure of opinion and political agitation, of a broader, unified German polity that would embody the new principles of national sovereignty, constitutionalism, liberalism, and even democracy.

However, it was archaic, autocratic, militaristic, antiliberal Prussia, ruled by a dynasty stubbornly undisposed to accommodate more than was absolutely necessary to the political spirit of the times, that-under the leadership of the greatest of all Junkers, Otto von Bismarck-performed the task of unifying Germany. And it did so through a sophisticated combination of the two counterbalancing devices of traditional power politics: diplomacy and war. But war played the more visible part in that combination: at Königgrätz in 1866 the Prussian army vanquished Austria, the other major contender for political leadership over the German lands, and in 1870 led the other German armies to a spectacular victory over the French Second Empire.

The fact that on January 18, 1870, the ceremony of the founding of the German Reich took place in vanquished France, and indeed at Versailles, in Louis XIV's own palace, signaled that the emergence of this powerful new empire at the center of Europe was the direct outcome of Sedan. The king of Prussia (then Wilhelm I) acquired the hereditary title of German emperor (Kaiser), some of whose powers (particularly those concerning army affairs and the appointment of the Reich's executive) paralleled those he possessed as king. Thus, and in other ways too complex to be reviewed here, the constitution of the new German polity established the dominance of Prussia-the largest and the strongest part of it, but by no means the most modernized economically, culturally, or politically.

The empire had a federal constitution, which reserved various powers to the autonomous institutions of its component territories; but at the federal level it provided no bill of rights and allowed no civilian supervision over military matters. Its chief representative body, the Reichstag, had legislative and budgetary powers (the latter very restricted as concerned military appropriations). But the federal executive was primarily responsible to the emperor, who freely appointed its prime minister-the chancellor-who was also the premier of Prussia. Complicated arrangements conferred on the Prussian legislature (outrageously non representative in its composition) indirect but highly significant powers over imperial affairs. Thus the German empire lacked the very substance of modern, representative politics: competition among parties over the electorate's support, resulting in the emergence of parliamentary majorities and/or coalitions and thus in the composition of an executive that forms policy and assumes responsibility for its outcome.

Political life in imperial Germany was thus, as it were, hollow at the center-if we take center as a metaphor for an arena where contrasting social interests, availing themselves of public freedoms, organize themselves from the bottom up in order both to interact with one another and to impinge upon the activities carried out by state institutions at the top. Conforming to a large extent, once more, with the Prussian model, the empire constituted instead an Obrigkeitsstaat-an expression hard to translate, but whose semantic burden lies probably in its first syllable, corresponding to the English over. This term suggests a state in which authority is unmistakably and unapologetically concentrated at the top, and it expresses itself in an assured, domineering fashion, for those "up there" (the authorities, the powers that be) are the sole guardians of interests-distinctively political interests-whose superiority over all others is (or had better be) undisputed. Thus in the imperial Obrigkeitsstaat, collective forces such as parties, which sought an investiture from below and expressly appealed to and represented interests of a social and economic nature-perceived as nonpolitical because divisive-were made to feel ineffective, insecure of their own legitimacy and relevance.

As a result, strong parties were first organized (overcoming much opposition and sometimes persecution from the powers that be) among large social groups which had reason to feel estranged from the existent order: the growing industrial proletariat, the Catholic populace, and the middle classes. But, even as suffrage was widened, these parties commanded only a (however sizeable and growing) minority within an electorate; the majority supported, instead, relatively weak, poorly organized parties, which represented fairly different social bases and policy options but were all basically at home in the current dispensation, or were unwilling or unable to challenge it in the name of liberal-democratic ideals.

For, after all, had not German unification, long a dream of some cultured, politically aware middle strata, particularly in the non-Prussian lands, eluded their own parties and movements, only to be achieved instead by authoritarian Prussia? Had not that achievement demonstrated the supreme significance, in the world as it is constituted, of power politics and the centrality to them of armed force, of which no better embodiment existed than the Prussian army, which now constituted the backbone of the Reich's armed forces? And since this newest great power had to maintain and assert itself in an inescapable contest with other great powers, did that not make domestic unity the critical political value, which would allow the Reich further to increase its military and industrial strength? Thus, was not the policy process the legitimate preserve of a strong executive, appointed by and responsible to the sovereign himself, and ably served by the Reich's uniquely competent and public-spirited officialdom, another precious legacy of Prussia's glorious past to the new German polity? Finally, had not the greatest Junker of all, Bismarck, guided the whole enterprise with the most consummate statesmanship, minimizing the leverage of parties and parliamentary institutions on policy, and showed the superiority of a strongly empowered, decisively led executive over an unsuitable liberal-democratic system, in which strong parties would endlessly enact their petty rivalries, neglecting the supreme concern of policymaking, the ceaseless pursuit of the nation's power in the context of world politics?

Indeed.

Continues...

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