The Form-world of Economic Life (A): Money

The standpoint from which to comprehend the economic history of great Cultures is not to be looked for on economic ground. Economic thought and action are a side of life that acquires a false appearance when regarded as a self-contained kind of life. Least of all is the secure standpoint to be had on the basis of the present-day world-economics, which for the last 150 years has been mounting fantastically, perilously, and in the end almost desperately—an economics, moreover, that is exclusively Western-dynamic, anything but common-human.

That which we call national economy to-day is built up on premisses that are openly and specifically English. The industry of machines, which is unknown to all other Cultures, stands in the centre as though it were a matter of course and, without men being conscious of the fact, completely dominates the formulation of ideas and the deduction of so-called laws. Credit-money, in the special form imparted to it by the relations of world-trade and export-industry in a peasantless England, serves as the foundation whereupon to define words like capital, value, price, property—and the definitions are then transferred without more ado to other Culture-stages and life-cycles. The insular position of England has determined a conception of politics, and of its relation to economics, that rules in all economic theories. The creators of this economic picture were David Hume⁠⁸⁴⁵ and Adam Smith.⁠⁸⁴⁶ Everything that has since been written about them or against them always presupposes the critical structure and methods of their systems. This is as true of Carey and List as it is of Fourier and Lassalle. As for Smith’s greatest adversary, Marx, it matters little how loudly one protests against English capitalism when one is thoroughly imbued with its images; the protest is itself a recognition, and its only aim is, through a new kind of accounting, to confer upon objects the advantage of being subjects.

From Adam Smith to Marx it is nothing but self-analysis of the economic thinking of a single Culture on a particular development-level. Rationalistic through and through, it starts from Material and its conditions, needs, and motives, instead of from the Soul—of generations, Estates, and peoples—and its creative power. It looks upon men as constituent parts of situations, and knows nothing of the big personality and history-shaping will, of individuals or of groups, the will that sees in the facts of economics not ends but means. It takes economic life to be something that can be accounted for without remainder by visible causes and effects, something of which the structure is quite mechanical and completely self-contained and even, finally, something that stands in some sort of causal relation to religion and politics—these again being considered as individual self-contained domains. As this outlook is the systematic and not the historical, the timeless and universal validity of its concepts and rules is an article of faith, and its ambition is to establish the one and only correct method of applying “the” science of management. And accordingly, wherever its truths have come into contact with the facts, it has experienced a complete fiasco—as was the case with the prophecies of bourgeois theorists concerning the World War,⁠⁸⁴⁷ and with those of proletarian theorists on the induction of the Soviet economy.

Up to now, therefore, there has been no national economy, in the sense of a morphology of the economic side of life and more particularly of that side in the life of the high Cultures, with their formations—concordant as to stage, tempo, and duration—of economic styles. Economics has no system, but a physiognomy. To fathom the secret of its inner form, its soul, demands the physiognomic flair. To succeed in it it is necessary to be a “judge” of it as one is a “judge” of men or of horses, and requires even less “knowledge” than that which a horseman needs to have of zoölogy. But this faculty of “judgment” can be awakened, and the way to awaken it is through the sympathetic outlook on history which gives a shrewd idea of the race-instincts, which are at work in the economic as in other constituents of active existence, symbolically shaping the external position—the economic “stuff,” the need—in harmony with their own inner character. All economic life is the expression of a soul-life.

This is a new, a German, outlook upon economics, an outlook from beyond all Capitalism and Socialism—both of which were products of the jejune rationality of the eighteenth century, and aimed at nothing but a material analysis and subsequent synthesis of the economic surface. All that has been taught hitherto is no more than preparatory. Economic thought, like legal,⁠⁸⁴⁸ stands now on the verge of its true and proper development, which (for us, as for the Hellenistic-Roman age) sets in only where art and philosophy have irrevocably passed away.

The attempt which follows is meant only as a flying survey of the possibilities here available.

Economics and politics are sides of the one livingly flowing current of being, and not of the waking-consciousness, the intellect.⁠⁸⁴⁹ In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. They may be said, not to have history, but to be history. Irreversible Time, the When, rules in them. They belong, both of them, to race and not, as religion and science belong, to language with its spatial-causal tensions; they regard facts, not truths. There are economic Destinies as there are political, whereas in scientific doctrines, as in religious, there is timeless connexion of cause and effect.

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of “condition” of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life’s will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the being-streams are fit as self-regarding, whereas in a political they are fit as other-regarding. And this holds good all along the series, from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning-through—the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger-death and hero-death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and debased by hunger—with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator, hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one’s life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

The double sense of all history that is manifested in man and woman has been discussed in an earlier chapter.⁠⁸⁵⁰ There is a private history which represents “life in space” as a procreation-series of the generations, and a public history that defends and secures it as a political “in-form”-ness—the “spindle side” and the “sword side” of being. They find expression in the ideas of Family and of State, but also in the primary form of the house⁠⁸⁵¹ wherein the good spirits of the marriage-bed—the Genius and the Juno of every old Roman dwelling—were protected by that of the door, the Janus. To this private history of the family the economic now attached itself. The duration of a flourishing life is inseparable from its strength; its secret of begetting and conceiving is seen at its purest in the being of breed-strong peasant stock that is rooted, healthy and fruitful, in its soil. And as in the form of the body the organ of sex is bound up with that of the circulation,⁠⁸⁵² so the middle of the house in another sense is formed by the sacred hearths, the Vesta.

For this very reason the significance of economic history is something quite different from that of political. In the latter the foreground is taken up by the great individual destinies, which fulfil themselves indeed in the binding forms of their epoch, but are nevertheless, each in itself, strictly personal. The concern of the former, and of family history, is the course of development of the form-language; everything once-occurring and personal is an unimportant private-destiny, and only the basic form common to the million cases matters. But even so economics is only a foundation, for Being that is in any way meaningful. What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is “in condition,” well nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so; and the higher man climbs historically, the more conspicuously his political and religious will to inward symbolism and force of expression towers above everything in the way of form and depth that the economic life as such possesses. It is only with the coming of the Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving begins to outline itself, nakedly and insistently—this is the time when the banal assertion that “hunger and love” are the driving forces of life ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes to mean, not a waxing in strength for the task, but a matter of “happiness of the greatest number,” of comfort and ease, of “panem et circenses”; and when, in the place of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end in itself.

Since economics belongs to the race side of life, it possesses, like politics, a customary ethic and not a moral—yet again the distinction of nobility and priesthood, facts and truths. A vocation-class, like an Estate, possesses a matter-of-course feeling for (not good and evil, but) good and bad. Not to have this feeling is to be void of honour, law. For those engaged in the economic life, too, honour stands as central criterion, with its tact and fine flair for what is “the right thing”—something quite separate from the sin-idea underlying the religious contemplation of the world. There exist, not only a very definite vocational honour amongst merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, but equally definite gradations downward for the shopkeeper, the exporter, the banker, the contractor, and even, as we all know, for thieves and beggars, in so far as two or three of them feel themselves as fellow practitioners. No one has stated or written out these customary-ethics, but they exist, and, like class-ethics everywhere and always, they are binding only within the circle of membership. Along with the noble virtues of loyalty and courage, chivalry and comradeship, which are found in every vocational society, there appear clean-cut notions of the ethical value of industry, of success, of work, and an astonishing sense of distinction and apartness. This sort of thing a man has—and without knowing much about it, for custom is evidenced to consciousness only when it is infringed—while, on the contrary, the prohibitions of religion which are timeless, universally valid, but never realizable ideals, must be, learned before a man can know or attempt to follow them.

Religious-ascetic fundamentals such as “selfless,” “sinless,” are without meaning in the economic life. For the true saint economics in itself is sinful,⁠⁸⁵³ and not merely taking of interest or pleasure in riches or the envy of the poor. The saying concerning the “lilies of the field” is for deeply religious (and philosophical) natures unreservedly true. The whole weight of their being lies outside economics and politics and all other facts of “this world.” We see it in Jesus’s times and St. Bernard’s and in the Russian soul of to-day; we see it too in the way of life of a Diogenes and a Kant. For its sake men choose voluntary poverty and itinerancy and hide themselves in cells and studies. Economic activity is never found in a religion or a philosophy, always only in the political organism of a church or the social organism of a theorizing fellowship; it is ever a compromise with “this world” and an index of the presence of a will-to-power.⁠⁸⁵⁴

That which may be called the economic life of the plant is accomplished on and in it without its being itself anything but the theatre and will-less object of a natural process.⁠⁸⁵⁵ This element underlies the economy of the human body also, still unalterably vegetal and dreamy, pursuing its will-less (in this respect almost alien) existence in the shape of the circulatory organs. But when we come to the animal body freely mobile in space, being is not alone—it is accompanied by waking-being, the comprehending apprehension, and, therefore, the compulsion to provide by independent thought for the preservation of life. Here begins life-anxiety, leading to touch and scent, sight and hearing with ever-sharper senses; and presently to movements in space for the purpose of searching, gathering, pursuing, tricking, stealing, which develop in many species of animals (such as beavers, ants, bees, numerous birds and beasts of prey) into a rudimentary economy-technique which presupposes a process of reflection and, therefore, a certain emancipation of understanding from sensation. Man is genuinely man inasmuch as his understanding has freed itself from sensation and, as thought, intervened creatively in the relations between microcosm and macrocosm.⁠⁸⁵⁶ Quite animal still is the trickery of woman towards man, and equally so the peasant’s shrewdness in obtaining small advantages—both differing in no wise from the slyness of the fox, both consisting in the ability to see into the secret of the victim at one glance. But on the top of this there supervenes, now, the economic thought that sows a field, tames animals, changes and appreciates and exchanges things, and finds a thousand ways and means of better preserving life and transforming a dependence upon the environment into a mastery over it. That is the underlayer of all Cultures. Race makes use of an economic thought that can become so powerful as to detach itself from given purposes, build up castles of abstraction, and finally lose itself in Utopian expanses.

All higher economic life develops itself on and over a peasantry. Peasantry, per se, does not presuppose any basis but itself.⁠⁸⁵⁷ It is, so to say, race-in-itself, plantlike and historyless,⁠⁸⁵⁸ producing and using wholly for itself, with an outlook on the world that sweepingly regards every other economic existence as incidental and contemptible. To this producing kind of economy there is presently opposed an acquisitive kind, which makes use of the former as an object—as a source of nourishment, tribute, or plunder. Politics and trade are in their beginnings quite inseparable, both being masterful, personal, warlike, both with a hunger for power and booty that produces quite another outlook upon the world—an outlook not from an angle into it, but from above down on its tempting disorder, an outlook which is pretty candidly expressed in the choice of the lion and the bear, the hawk and the falcon, as armorial badges. Primitive war is always also booty-war, and primitive trade intimately related to plunder and piracy. The Icelandic sagas narrate how, often, the Vikings would agree with a town population for a market-peace of a fortnight, after which weapons were drawn and booty-making started.

Politics and trade in developed form—the art of achieving material successes over an opponent by means of intellectual superiority—are both a replacement of war by other means. Every kind of diplomacy is of a business nature, every business of a diplomatic, and both are based upon penetrative judgment of men and physiognomic tact. The adventure-spirit in great seafarers like the Phœnicians, Etruscans, Normans, Venetians, Hanseatics, the spirit of shrewd banking-lords like the Fugger and the Medici and of mighty financiers like Crassus and the mining and trust magnates of our own day, must possess the strategic talent of the general if its operations are to succeed. Pride in the clan-house, the paternal heritage, the family tradition, develops and counts in the economic sphere as in the political; the great fortunes are like the kingdoms and have their history,⁠⁸⁵⁹ and Polycrates and Solon, Lorenzo de’ Medici and Jürgen Wullenweber are far from being the only examples of political ambitions developing out of commercial.

But the genuine prince and statesman wants to rule, and the genuine merchant only wants to be wealthy, and here the acquisitive economy divides to pursue aim and means separately.⁠⁸⁶⁰ One may aim at booty for the sake of power, or at power for the sake of booty. The great ruler, too, the Hwang-ti, the Tiberius, the Frederick II—has the will to wealth, the will to be “rich in land and subjects,” but it is with and under a sense of high responsibilities. A man may lay hands on the treasurers of the whole world with a good conscience, not to say as a matter of course: he may lead a life of radiant splendour or even dissipation—if only he feels himself (Napoleon, Cecil Rhodes, the Roman Senate of the third century) to be the engine of a mission. When he feels so, the idea of private property can scarcely be said to exist so far as he is concerned.

He who is out for purely economic advantages—as the Carthaginians were in Roman times and, in a far greater degree still, the Americans in ours—is correspondingly incapable of purely political thinking. In the decisions of high politics he is ever deceived and made a tool of, as the case of Wilson shows—especially when the absence of statesmanlike instinct leaves a chair vacant for moral sentiments. This is why the great economic groupings of the present day (for example, employers’ and employees’ unions) pile one political failure on another, unless indeed they find a real political politician as leader, and he—makes use of them. Economic and political thinking, in spite of a high degree of consonance of form, are in direction (and therefore in all tactical details) basically different. Great business successes⁠⁸⁶¹ awaken an unbridled sense of public power—in the very word “capital” one catches an unmistakable undertone of this. But it is only in a few individuals that the colour and direction of their willing and their criteria of situations of things undergo change. Only when a man has really ceased to feel his enterprise as “his own business,” and its aim as the simple amassing of property, does it become possible for the captain of industry to become the statesman, the Cecil Rhodes. But, conversely, the men of the political world are exposed to the danger of their will and thought for historical tasks degenerating into mere provision for their private life-upkeep; then a nobility can become a robber-order, and we see emerging the familiar types of princes and ministers, demagogues and revolution-heroes, whose zeal exhausts itself in lazy comfortableness and the piling-up of immense riches—there is little to choose in this respect between Versailles and the Jacobin Club, business bosses and trade-union leaders, Russian governors and Bolshevists. And in the maturity of democracy the politics of those who have “got there” is identical, not merely with business, but with speculative business of the dirtiest great-city sort.

All this, however, is the very manifestation of the hidden course of a high Culture. In the beginning appear the primary orders, nobility and priesthood, with their symbolism of Time and Space. The political life, like the religious experience, has its fixed place, its ordained adepts, and its allotted aims for facts and truths alike, in a well-ordered society,⁠⁸⁶² and down below, the economic life moves unconscious along a sure path. Then the stream of being becomes entangled in the stone structures of the town, and intellect and money thenceforward take over its historical guidance. The heroic and the saintly with their youthful symbolic force become rarer, and withdraw into narrower and narrower circles. Cool bourgeois clarity takes their place. At bottom, the concluding of a system and the concluding of a deal call for one and the same kind of professional intelligence. Scarcely differentiated now by any measure of symbolic force, political and economic life, religious and scientific experience make each other’s acquaintance, jostle one another, commingle. In the frictions of the city the stream of being loses its strict rich form. Elementary economic factors come to the surface and interplay with the remains of form-imbued politics, just as sovereign science at the same time adds religion to its stock of objects. Over a life of economics political self-satisfaction spreads a critical-edifying world-sentiment. But out of it all emerge, in place of the decayed Estates, the individual life-courses, big with true political or religious force, that are to become destiny for the whole.

And thus we begin to discern the morphology of economic history. First there is a primitive economy of “man,” which—like that of plants and animals—follows a biological⁠⁸⁶³ time-scale in the development of its forms. It completely dominates the primitive age, and it continues to move on, infinitely slowly and confusedly, underneath and between the high Cultures. Animals and plants are brought into it and transformed by taming and breeding, selection and sowing; fire and metals are exploited, and the properties of inorganic nature made by technical processes serviceable for the conduct of life. All this is perfused with political-religious ethic and meaning, without its being possible distinctly to separate Totem and Taboo, hunger, soul-fear, sex-love, art, war, sacrificial rites, belief, and experience.

Wholly different from this, both in idea and in evolution, and sharply marked off in tempo and duration, are the economic histories of the high Cultures, each of which has its own economic style. To feudalism belongs the economy of the townless countryside. With the State ruled radially from cities appears the urban economy of money, and this rises, with the oncoming of the Civilization, into the dictature of money, simultaneously with the victory of world-city democracy. Every Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. But the economic life, just like the social, forms itself pyramidally.⁠⁸⁶⁴ In the rustic underground a thoroughly primitive condition maintains itself almost unaffected by the Culture. The Late urban economy, which is already the activity of a resolute minority, looks down with steady contempt upon the pristine land-economy that continues all around it, while the latter in turn glares sulkily at the intellectualized style that prevails within the walls. Finally the cosmopolis brings in a Civilized world-economy, which radiates from very small nuclei within a few centres, and subjects the rest to itself as a provincial economy, while in the remoter landscapes thoroughly primitive (“patriarchal”) custom often prevails still. With the growth of the cities the way of life becomes ever more artificial, subtle and complex. The great-city worker of Cæsar’s Rome, of Haroun-al-Raschid’s Baghdad, and of the present-day Berlin feels as self-evidently necessary much that the richest yeoman deep in the country regards as silly luxury, but this self-evident standard is hard to reach and hard to maintain. In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China—unless, of course, the crust is being disintegrated from below by the pressure of a young Culture, like the Classical in Diocletian’s time.

Relatively to this economic movement, men are economically “in form” as an economic class, just as they are in form for world-history as a political Estate. Each individual has an economic position within the economic order just as he has a grade of some sort in the society. Now, both these kinds of allegiances make claims upon the feelings, thoughts, and relations all at once. A life insists on being, and on meaning something as well, and the confusion of our ideas is made worse confounded by the fact that, to-day, as in Hellenistic times, political parties, in their desire to ameliorate the upkeep-standards of certain economic groups, have elevated these groups to the dignity of a political Estate, as Marx, for instance, elevated the class of factory-workers.

Confusion—for the first and genuine Estate is nobility. From it the officer and the judge and all concerned in the highest duties of government and administration are direct derivatives. They are Estate-like formations that mean something. So, too, the body of scholars and scientists belongs to the priesthood⁠⁸⁶⁵ and has a very sharply definite kind of class-exclusiveness. But the grand symbolism of the Estates goes out with castle and cathedral. The Tiers, already, is the Non-Estate, the remainder, a miscellaneous and manifold congeries, which means very little as such save in the moments of political protest, so that the importance it creates for itself is a party importance. The individual is conscious of himself not as a bourgeois, but because he is a “liberal” and thus part and parcel of a great thing, not indeed as representing it in his person, but as adhering to it from conviction. In consequence of this weakness of its social “form,” the economic “form” of the bourgeoisie becomes all the more relatively conspicuous in its callings, guilds and unions. In the cities, at any rate, a man is primarily designated according to the way in which he makes his living.

Economically, the first (and anciently almost the only) mode of life is that of the peasant,⁠⁸⁶⁶ which is pure production, and therefore the pre-condition of every other mode. Even the primary Estates, too, in early times, base their way of life entirely upon hunting, stock-keeping, and agricultural landowning, and even in Late periods land is regarded by nobles and priests as the only truly honourable kind of property. In opposition to it stands trade, the mode of the acquisitive middleman or intervener,⁠⁸⁶⁷ powerful out of all proportion to its numbers, already indispensable even in quite early conditions—a refined parasitism, completely unproductive and, therefore, land-alien and far-ranging, “free,” and unhampered spiritually, too, by the ethic and the practice of the countryside, a life sustaining itself on another life. Between the two, now, a third kind of economy, the preparatory economy of technics, grows up in numberless crafts, industries, and callings, which creatively apply reflections upon nature and whose honour and conscience are bound up in achievement.⁠⁸⁶⁸ Its oldest guild, which reaches back into the sheer primitive and fills the picture of this primitive with its dark sagas and rites and notions, is the guild of the smiths, who—as the result of their proud aloofness from the peasantry and the fear that hangs about them, and leads to their being venerated and banned by turns—have often become true tribes with a race of their own, as in the case of the Abyssinian Falasha or “Black Jews.”⁠⁸⁶⁹

In these three economics of production, preparation, and distribution, as in everything else belonging to politics and life at large, there are the subjects and objects of leading—in this case, whole groups that dispose, decide, organize, discover; and other whole groups whose function is simply to execute. The grading may be hard and definite or it may be scarcely perceptible,⁠⁸⁷⁰ promotion may be impossible or unimpeded, the relative dignity of the task may be almost equal throughout a long scale of slow transitions or different beyond comparison. Tradition and law, talent and possessions, population numbers, cultural level, and economic situation may effectively override this basic antithesis of subjects and objects—but it exists, it is as much a premiss as life itself, and it is unalterable. Nevertheless, economically there is no worker-class; that is an invention of theorists who have fixed their eyes on the position of factory-workers in England—an industrial, peasantless land in a transitional phase—and then extended the resultant scheme so confidently over all the Cultures and all the ages that the politicians have taken it up and used it as a means of building themselves parties. In actuality there is an almost uncountable number of purely serving activities in workshop and counting-houses, office and cargo-deck, roads, mine-shafts, fields, and meadows. This counting-up, portering, running of errands, hammering, serving, and minding often enough lacks that element which elevates life above mere upkeep and invests work with the dignity and the delight attaching, for example, to the status-duties of the officer and the savant, or the personal triumphs of the engineer, the manager, and the merchant—but, even apart from that, all these things are quite incapable of being compared amongst themselves. The brain or brawn of the work, its situation in village or in megalopolis, the duration and intensity of the doing of it, bring it to pass that farm-labourers, bank clerks, and tailors’ hands live in perfectly different economic worlds, and it is only, I repeat, the party politics of quite Late phases that lures them by means of catchwords into a protest-combination, with the intention of making use of its aggregate mass. The classical slave, on the contrary, is such chiefly in terms of constitutional law—that is, so far as the body-Polis was concerned, he simply did not exist⁠⁸⁷¹—but economically he might be land-worker or craftsman, or even director or wholesale merchant with a huge capital (peculium), with palaces and country villas and a host of subordinates—freemen included. And what he could become, over and above this, in late Roman times will appear in the sequel.

With the oncoming of Spring there begins in every Culture an economic life of settled form.⁠⁸⁷² The life of the population is entirely that of the peasant on the open land. The experience of the town has not yet come. All that elevates itself from amongst the villages, castles, palaces, monasteries, temple-closes, is not a city, but a market, a mere meeting-point of yeomen’s interests, which also acquired, and at once, a certain religious and political meaning, but certainly cannot be said to have had a special life of its own. The inhabitants, even though they might be artisans or traders, would still feel as peasants, and even in one way or another work as such.

That which separates out from a life in which everyone is alike producer and consumer is goods, and traffic in goods is the mark of all early intercourse, whether the object be brought from the far distance or merely shifted about within the limits of the village or even the farm. A piece of goods is that which adheres by some quiet threads of its essence to the life that has produced it or the life that uses it. A peasant drives “his” cow to market, a woman puts away “her” finery in the cupboard. We say that a man is endowed with this world’s “goods”; the word “possession” takes us back right into the plantlike origin of property, into which this particular being—no other—has grown, from the roots up.⁠⁸⁷³ Exchange in these periods is a process whereby goods pass from one circle of life into another. They are valued with reference to life, according to a sliding-scale of felt relation to the moment. There is neither a conception of value nor a kind or amount of goods that constitutes a general measure—for gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes them to be highly prized.⁠⁸⁷⁴

Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as an intervener.⁠⁸⁷⁵ In the market the acquisitive and the creative economics encounter one another, but even at places where fleets and caravans unload, trade only appears as the organ of countryside traffic.⁠⁸⁷⁶ It is the “eternal” form of economy, and is even to-day seen in the immemorially ancient figure of the pedlar of the country districts remote from towns, and in out-of-the-way suburban lanes where small barter-circles form naturally, and in the private economy of savants, officials, and in general everyone not actively part of the daily economic life of the great city.

With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens.⁠⁸⁷⁷ As soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of mere centres for goods-streams traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life “out there” is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. The decisive point is this—the true urban man is not a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life-upkeep.

With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money.

With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract money corresponds exactly to abstract number.⁠⁸⁷⁸ 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.⁠⁸⁷⁹ 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.⁠⁸⁸⁰ 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.⁠⁸⁸¹

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 unqualitative measures. Now gold is no longer measured against the cow, but the cow against the gold, and the result is expressed by an abstract number, the price. Whether and how this measure of value finds symbolic expression in a value-sign—as the written, spoken, or represented number-sign is, in a sense, number—depends on the economic style of the particular Culture, each of which produces a different sort of money. The common condition for the appearance of this is the existence of an urban population that thinks economically in terms of it, and it is its particular character that settles whether the value-token shall serve also as payment-medium; thus the Classical coin and probably the Babylonian silver did so serve, whereas the Egyptian deben (raw copper weighed out in pounds) was a measure of exchange, but neither token nor payment-medium. The Western and the “contemporary” Chinese bank-note,⁠⁸⁸² again, is a medium, but not a measure. In fact we are accustomed to deceive ourselves thoroughly as to the rôle played by coins of precious metal in our sort of economy; they are just wares fashioned in imitation of the Classical custom, and hence, measured against book-values of credit money, they have a “price.”

The outcome of this way of thinking is that the old possession, bound up with life and the soil, gives way to the fortune, which is essentially mobile and qualitatively undefined: it does not consist in goods, but it is laid out in them. Considered by itself, it is a purely numerical quantum of money-value.⁠⁸⁸³

As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the centre of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods. And with this the trader, from being an organ of economic life, becomes its master. Thinking in money is always, in one way or another, trade or business thinking. It presupposes the productive economy of the land, and, therefore, is always primarily acquisitive, for there is no third course. The very words “acquisition,” “gain,” “speculation,” point to a profit tricked off from the goods en route to the consumer—an intellectual plunder—and for that reason are inapplicable to the early peasantry. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and economic outlook of the true townsman can we realize what they mean. He works not for needs, but for sales, for “money.” The business view gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. The countryman, inwardly bound up with traffic in goods, was at once giver and taker, and even the trader of the primitive market was hardly an exception to this rule. But with money-traffic there appears between producer and consumer, as though between two separate worlds, the third party, the middleman, whose thought is dominated a priori by the business side of life. He forces the producer to offer, and the consumer to inquire of him. He elevates mediation to a monopoly and thereafter to economic primacy, and forces the other two to be “in form” in his interest, to prepare the wares according to his reckonings, and to cheapen them under the pressure of his offers.

He who commands this mode of thinking is the master of money.⁠⁸⁸⁴ In all the Cultures evolution takes this road. Lysias informs us in his oration against the corn-merchants that the speculators at the Piræus frequently spread reports of the wreck of a grain-fleet or of the outbreak of war, in order to produce a panic. In Hellenistic-Roman times it was a widespread practice to arrange for land to go out of cultivation, or for imports to be held in bond, in order to force up prices. In the Egyptian New Empire wheat-corners in the American style were made possible by a bill-discounting that is fully comparable with the banking operations of the West.⁠⁸⁸⁵ Cleomenes, Alexander the Great’s administrator for Egypt, was able by book transactions to get the whole corn-supply into his own hands, thereby producing a famine far and wide in Greece and raking in immense gains for himself. To think economically on any terms but these is simply to become a mere pawn in the money-operations of the great city. This style of thought soon gets hold of the waking-consciousness of the entire urban population and, therefore, of everyone who plays any serious part in the conduct of economic history. “Peasant” and “burgher” stand not only for the difference of country and city, but for that of possessions and money as well. The splendid Culture of Homeric and Provençal princely courts was something that waxed and waned with the men themselves—we can often, even to-day, see it in the life of old families in their country-seats—but the more refined culture of the bourgeoisie, its “comfort,” is something coming from outside, something that can be paid for.⁠⁸⁸⁶ All highly developed economy is urban economy. World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. The destinies even of this world-economy are now decided in a few places, the “money-markets” of the world⁠⁸⁸⁷—in Babylon, Thebes, and Rome, in Byzantium and Baghdad, in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris. The residue is a starveling provincial economy that runs on in its narrow circles without being conscious of its utter dependence. Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, are concentrated. Shaw is entirely right when he says: “The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization ... the two things [money and life] are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life....”⁠⁸⁸⁸ What is here described as Civilization, then, is the stage of a Culture at which tradition and personality have lost their immediate effectiveness, and every idea, to be actualized, has to be put into terms of money. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful—now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.

Through the economic history of every Culture there runs a desperate conflict waged by the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its soul, against the spirit of money. The peasant-wars of the beginning of a Late period (in the Classical, 700–500; in the Western, 1450–1650; in the Egyptian, end of Old Kingdom) are the first reaction of the blood against the money that is stretching forth its hand from the waxing cities over the soil.⁠⁸⁸⁹ Stein’s warning that “he who mobilizes the soil dissolves it into dust” points to a danger common to all Cultures; if money is unable to attack possession, it insinuates itself into the thoughts of the noble and peasant possessors, until the inherited possession that has grown with the family’s growth begins to seem like resources merely “put into” land and soil and, so far as their essence is concerned, mobile.⁠⁸⁹⁰ Money aims at mobilizing all things. World-economy is the actualized economy of values that are completely detached in thought from the land, and made fluid.⁠⁸⁹¹ The Classical money-thinking, from Hannibal’s day, transformed whole cities into coin and whole populations into slaves and thereby converted both into money that could be brought from everywhere to Rome, and used outwards from Rome as a power.

The Faustian money-thinking “opens up” whole continents, the water-power of gigantic river-basins, the muscular power of the peoples of broad regions, the coal measures, the virgin forests, the laws of Nature, and transforms them all into financial energy, which is laid out in one way or in another—in the shape of press, or elections, or budgets, or armies—for the realization of masters’ plans. Ever new values are abstracted from whatever world-stock is still, from the business point of view, unclaimed, “the slumbering spirits of gold,” as John Gabriel Borkman says; and what the things themselves are, apart from this, is of no economic significance at all.

As every Culture has its own mode of thinking in money, so also it has its proper money-symbol through which it brings to visible expression its principle of valuation in the economic field. This something, a sense-actualizing of the thought, is in importance fully the equal of the spoken, written, or drawn figures and other symbols of the mathematic. Here lies a deep and fruitful domain of inquiry, so far almost unexplored. Not even the basic notions have been correctly enunciated, and it is therefore quite impossible to-day to translate intelligibly the money-idea that underlay the barter and the bill business of Egypt, the banking of Babylonia, the book-keeping of China, and the capitalism of the Jews, Parsees, Greeks, and Arabs from Haroun-al-Raschid’s day. All that is possible is to set forth the essential opposition of Apollinian and Faustian money—the one, money as magnitude, and the other, money as function.⁠⁸⁹²

Economically, as in other ways, Classical man saw his world-around as a sum of bodies that changed their place, travelled, drove or hit or annihilated one another, as in Democritus’s description of Nature. Man was a body among bodies, and the Polis as sum thereof a body of higher order. All the needs of life consisted in corporeal quantities, and money, too, therefore represented such a body, in the same way as an Apollo-statue represented a god. About 650, simultaneously with the stone body of the Doric temple and the free statue true-modelled in the round, appeared the coin, a metal weight of beautiful impressed form. Value as a magnitude had long existed—in fact as long as this Culture itself. In Homer, a talent is a little aggregate of gold, in bullion and decorative objects, of a definite total weight. The Shield of Achilles represents “two talents” of gold, and even as late as Roman times it was usual to specify silver and gold vessels by weight.⁠⁸⁹³

The discovery of the Classically formed money-body, however, is so extraordinary that we have not even yet grasped it in its deep and purely Classical significance. We regard it as one of the “achievements of humanity,” and so we strike these coinages everywhere, just as we put statues in our streets and squares. So much and no more it is within our power to do; we can imitate the shape, but we cannot impart the same economic significance thereto. The coin as money is a purely Classical phenomenon—only possible in an environment conceived wholly on Euclidean ideas, but there creatively dominant over all economic life. Notions like income, resources, debt, capital, meant in the Classical cities something quite different from what they mean to us. They meant, not economic energy radiating from a point, but a sum of valuable objects in hand. Wealth was always a mobile cash-supply, which was altered by addition and subtraction of valuable objects and had nothing at all to do with possessions in land—for in Classical thinking the two were completely separate. Credit consisted in the lending of cash in the expectation that the loan would be repaid in cash. Catiline was poor because, in spite of his wide estates,⁠⁸⁹⁴ he could find nobody to lend him the cash that he needed for his political aims; and the immense debts of Roman politicians⁠⁸⁹⁵ had for their ultimate security, not their equivalent in land, but the definite prospect of a province to be plundered of its movable assets.⁠⁸⁹⁶

In the light of this, and only in the light of this, we begin to understand certain phenomena such as the mass-execution of the wealthy under the Second Tyrannis, and the Roman proscriptions (with the object of seizing a large part of the cash current in the community), and the melting down of the Delphian temple-treasure by the Phocians in the Sacred War, of the art-treasures of Corinth by Mummius, and of the last votive offerings in Rome by Cæsar, in Greece by Sulla, in Asia Minor by Brutus and Cassius, without regard to artistic value when the noble stuffs and metals and ivory were needed.⁠⁸⁹⁷ The captured statues and the vessels borne in the triumphs were, in the eyes of the spectators, sheer cash, and Mommsen⁠⁸⁹⁸ could attempt to determine the site of Varus’s disaster by the places in which coin-hoards were unearthed—for the Roman veteran carried his whole property in precious metal on his person. Classical wealth does not consist in having possessions, but piling money; a Classical money-market was not a centre of credit like the bourses of our world and of ancient Thebes, but a city in which an important part of the world’s cash was actually collected. It may be taken that in Cæsar’s time much more than half of the Classical world’s gold was in Rome.

But when, from about Hannibal’s time, this world advanced into the state of unlimited plutocracy, the naturally limited mass of precious metals and materially valuable works of art in its sphere of control became hopelessly inadequate to cover needs, and a veritable craving set in for new bodies capable of being used as money. Then it was that men’s eyes fell upon the slave, who was another sort of body, but a thing and not a person⁠⁸⁹⁹ and capable, therefore, of being thought of as money. From that point Classical slavery became unique of its kind in all economic history. The properties of the coin were extended to apply to living objects, and the stock of men in the regions “opened up” to the plunderings of proconsuls and tax-farmers became as interesting as the stock of metal. A curious sort of double valuation developed. The slave had a market price, although ground and soil had not. He served for the accumulation of great uninvested fortunes, and hence the enormous slave-masses of the Roman period, which are entirely inexplicable by any other sort of necessity. So long as man needed only as many slaves as he could gainfully employ, their number was small and easily covered by the prisoners of war and judgment-debtors.⁠⁹⁰⁰ It was in the sixth century that Chios made a beginning with the importation of bought slaves (Argyronetes). The difference between these and the far more numerous paid labourers was originally of a political and legal, not an economic kind. As the Classical economy was static and not dynamic, and was ignorant of the systematic opening-up of energy-sources, the slaves of the Roman age did not exist to be exploited in work, but were employed—more or less—so that the greatest possible number of them could be maintained. Specially presentable slaves possessing particular qualifications of one sort or another were preferred, because for equal cost of maintenance they represented a better asset; they were loaned as cash was loaned; and they were allowed to have businesses on their account, so that they could become rich;⁠⁹⁰¹ free labour was undersold—all this so as to cover at any rate the upkeep of this capital.⁠⁹⁰² The bulk of them cannot have been employed at all. They answered their purpose by simply existing, as a stock of money in hand which was not bound up to a natural limit like the stock of metal available in those days. And through that very fact the need of slaves grew and grew indefinitely and led, not only to wars that were undertaken simply for slave-getting, but to slave-hunting by private entrepreneurs all along the Mediterranean coasts (which Rome winked at) and to a new way of making the proconsuls’ fortunes, which consisted in bleeding the population of a region and then selling it into slavery for debt. The market of Delos must have dealt with ten thousand slaves a day. When Cæsar went to Britain, the disappointment caused in Rome by the money-poverty of the Britons was compensated by the prospect of rich booty in slaves. When, for example, Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down of the statues for coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, for Classical minds, one and the same operation—the transformation of corporeal objects into money.

In extremest contrast to this stands the symbol of Faustian money—money as Function, the value of which lies in its effect and not its mere existence. The specific style of this economic thinking appears already in the way in which the Normans of A.D. 1000 organized their spoils of men and land into an economic force.⁠⁹⁰³ Compare the pure book-valuation of these ducal officials (commemorated in our words “cheque,” “account,” and “checking”)⁠⁹⁰⁴ with the “contemporary” gold talent of the Iliad, one meets at the very outset of the Culture the rudiments of its modern credit-system, which is the outcome of confidence in the force and durability of its economic mode, and with which the idea of money in our sense is almost identical. These financial methods, transplanted to the Roman Kingdom of Sicily by Roger II, were developed by the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II (about 1230) into a powerful system far surpassing the original in dynamism and making him the “first capitalist power of the world”;⁠⁹⁰⁵ and while this fraternization of mathematical thinking-power and royal will-to-power made its way from Normandy into France and was applied on the grand scale to the exploitation of conquered England (to this day English soil is nominally royal demesne) its Sicilian side was imitated by the Italian city-republics, and (as their ruling patricians soon took the methods of the civic economy into use for their private book-keeping,) spread over the commercial thought and practice of the whole Western world. Little later, the Sicilian methods were adopted by the Order of the Teutonic Knights and by the dynasty of Aragon, and it is probably to these origins that we should assign the model accountancy of Spain in the days of Philip II, and of Prussia in those of Frederick William I.

The decisive event, however, was the invention—“contemporary” with that of the Classical coin about 650—of double-entry book-keeping by Fra Luca Pacioli in 1494. Goethe calls this in Wilhelm Meister “one of the finest discoveries of the human intellect,” and indeed its author may without hesitation be ranked with his contemporaries Columbus and Copernicus. To the Normans we owe our modes of reckoning and to the Lombards our book-keeping. These, be it observed, were the same two Germanic stocks which created the two most suggestive juristic works of the early Gothic,⁠⁹⁰⁶ and whose longing into distant seas gave the impulses for the two discoveries of America. “Double-entry book-keeping is born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton.... With the same means as these, it orders the phenomenon into an elegant system, and it may be called the first Cosmos built up on the basis of a mechanistic thought. Double-entry book-keeping discloses to us the Cosmos of the economic world by the same method as later the Cosmos of the stellar universe was unveiled by the great investigation of natural philosophy.... Double-entry book-keeping rests on the basic principle, logically carried out, of comprehending all phenomena purely as quantities.”⁠⁹⁰⁷

Double-entry book-keeping is a pure Analysis of the space of values, referred to a co-ordinate system, of which the origin is the “Firm.” The coinage of the Classical world had only permitted of arithmetical compilations with value-magnitudes. Here, as ever, Pythagoras and Descartes stand opposed. It is legitimate for us to talk of the “integration” of an undertaking, and the graphic curve is the same optical auxiliary to economics as it is to science. The Classical economy-world was ordered, like the cosmos of Democritus, according to stuff and form. A stuff, in the form of a coin, carries the economic movement and presses against the demand-unit of equal value-quantity at the place of use. Our economy-world is ordered by force and mass. A field of money-tensions lies in space and assigns to every object, irrespective of its specific kind, a positive or negative effect-value,⁠⁹⁰⁸ which is represented by a book-entry. “Quod non est in libris, non est in mundo.” But the symbol of the functional money thus imagined, that which alone may be compared with the Classical coin, is not the actual book-entry, nor yet the share-voucher, cheque, or note, but the act by which the function is fulfilled in writing, and the rôle of the value-paper is merely to be the generalized historical evidence of this act.

Yet side by side with this the West, in its unquestioning admiration of the Classical, has gone on striking coins, not merely as tokens of sovereignty, but in the belief that this evidenced money was money corresponding in reality to the economics in thought. In just the same way, even within the Gothic age, we took over Roman law with its equating of things to bodily magnitudes, and the Euclidean mathematic, which was built upon the concept of number as magnitude. And so it befell that the evolution of these three intellectual form-worlds of ours proceeded, not like the Faustian music in a pure and flowerlike unfolding, but in the shape of a progressive emancipation from the notion of magnitude. The mathematic had already achieved this by the close of the Baroque age.⁠⁹⁰⁹ The jurisprudence, on the other hand, has not yet even recognized its coming task,⁠⁹¹⁰ but this century is going to set it, and to demand that which for Roman jurists was the self-evident basis of law, namely, the inward congruence of economic and legal thought and an equal practical familiarity with both. The conception of money that was symbolized in the coin agreed precisely with the Classical thing-law, but with us there is nothing remotely like such an agreement. Our whole life is disposed dynamically, not statically and Stoically; therefore our essentials are forces and performances, relations and capacities—organizing talents and intuitive intellects, credit, ideas, methods, energy-sources—and not mere existence of corporeal things. The “Romanist” thing-thought of our jurists, and the theory of money that consciously or unconsciously starts from the coin, are equally alien to our life. The vast metallic hoard to which, in imitation of the Classical, we were continually adding till the World War came, has indeed made a rôle for itself off the main road, but with the inner form, tasks, and aims of modern economy it has nothing to do; and if as the result of the war it were to disappear from currency altogether, nothing would be altered thereby.⁠⁹¹¹

Unhappily, the modern national economics were founded in the age of Classicism. Just as statues and vases and stiff dramas alone counted as true art, so also finely stamped coins alone counted as true money. What Josiah Wedgwood (1758) aimed at with his delicately toned reliefs and cups, that also, at bottom, Adam Smith aimed at in his theory of value—namely, the pure present of tangible magnitudes. For it is entirely consonant with the illusion that money and pieces of money are the same, to measure the value of a thing against the magnitude of a quantity of work. Here work is no longer an effecting in a world of effects, a working which can differ infinitely from case to case as to inward worth and intensity and range, which propagates itself in wider and wider circles and like an electric field may be measured but not marked off—but the result of the effecting, considered entirely materially, that which is worked-up, a tangible thing showing nothing noteworthy about it except just its extent.

In reality, the economy of the European-American Civilization is built up on work of a kind in which distinctions go entirely according to the inner quality—more so than ever in China or Egypt, let alone the Classical World. It is not for nothing that we live in a world of economic dynamism, where the works of the individual are not additive in the Euclidean way, but functionally related to one another. The purely executive work (which alone Marx takes into account) is in reality nothing but the function of an inventive, ordering, and organizing work; it is from this that the other derives its meaning, relative value, and even possibility of being done at all. The whole world-economy since the discovery of the steam-engine has been the creation of a quite small number of superior heads, without whose high-grade work everything else would never have come into being. But this achievement is of creative thinking, not a quantum,⁠⁹¹² and its value is not to be weighed against a certain number of coins. Rather it is itself money—Faustian money, namely, which is not minted, but thought of as an efficient centre coming up out of a life—and it is the inward quality of that life which elevates the thought to the significance of a fact. Thinking in money generates money—that is the secret of the world-economy. When an organizing magnate writes down a million on paper, that million exists, for the personality as an economic centre vouches for a corresponding heightening of the economic energy of his field. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the word “Credit” for us. But all the gold pieces in the world would not suffice to invest the actions of the manual worker with a meaning, and therefore a value, if the famous “expropriation of the expropriators” were to eliminate the superior capacities from their creations; were this to happen, these would become soulless, will-less, empty shells. Thus, in fact, Marx is just as much a Classical, just as truly a product of the Romanist law-thought as Adam Smith; he sees only the completed magnitude, not the function, and he would like to separate the means of production from those whose minds, by the discovery of methods, the organization of efficient industries, and the acquisition of outlet-markets, alone turn a mass of bricks and steel into a factory, and who, if their forces find no field of play, do not occur.⁠⁹¹³

If anyone seeks to enunciate a theory of modern work, let him begin by thinking of this basic trait of all life. There are subjects and objects in every kind of life as lived, and the more important, the more rich in form, the life is, the clearer the distinction between them. As every stream of Being consists of a minority of leaders and a huge majority of led, so every sort of economy consists in leader-work and executive work. The frog’s perspective of Marx and the social-ethical ideologues shows only the aggregate of last small things, but these only exist at all in virtue of the first things, and the spirit of this world of work can be grasped only through a grasp of its highest possibilities. The inventor of the steam-engine and not its stoker is the determinant. The thought is what matters.

And, similarly, thinking in money has subjects and objects: those who by force of their personality generate and guide money, and those who are maintained by money. Money of the Faustian brand is the force distilled from economy-dynamics of the Faustian brand, and it appertains to the destiny of the individual (on the economic side of his life-destiny) that he is inwardly constituted to represent a part of this force, or that he is, on the contrary, nothing but mass to it.

The word “Capital” signifies the centre of this thought—not the aggregate of values, but that which keeps them in movement as such. Capitalism comes into existence only with the world-city existence of a Civilization, and it is confined to the very small ring of those who represent this existence by their persons and intelligence; its opposite is the provincial economy. It was the unconditional supremacy achieved by the coin in Classical life (including the political side of that life) that generated the static capital, the ἀφορμή or starting-point, that by its existence drew to itself, in a sort of magnetic attraction, things and again things en masse. It was the supremacy of book-values, whose abstract system was quickly detached from personality by double-entry book-keeping and worked forward by virtue of its own inward dynamism, that produced the modern capital that spans the whole earth with its field of force.⁠⁹¹⁴

Under the influence of its own sort of capital the economic life of the Classical world took the form of a gold-stream that flowed from the provinces to Rome and back, and was ever seeking new areas whose stock of worked-up gold had not yet been “opened up.” Brutus and Cassius carried the gold of Asia Minor on long mule-trains to the battle-field of Philippi—one can imagine what sort of an economic operation the plunder of a camp after a battle must have been—and even C. Gracchus, almost a century earlier, alluded to the amphoræ that went out from Rome to the provinces full of wine and came back full of gold. This hunt for the gold possessions of alien peoples corresponds exactly to the present-day hunt for coal, which in its deeper meaning is not a thing, but a store of energy.

But, equally, the Classical craving for the near and present could not but match the Polis-ideal with an economic ideal of Autarkeia, an economic atomization corresponding to the political. Each of these tiny life-units desired to have an economic stream wholly of its own, wholly self-contained, circling independently of all others and within the radius of visibility. The polar opposite of this is the Western notion of the Firm, which is thought of as an entirely impersonal and incorporeal centre of force, from which activity streams out in all directions to an indefinite distance, and which the proprietor by his ability to think in money does not represent, but possesses and directs—that is, has in his power—like a little cosmos. The duality of firm and proprietor would have been utterly unimaginable for the Classical mind.⁠⁹¹⁵

Consequently, as the Western Culture presents a maximum, so the Classical shows a minimum, of organization. For this was completely absent even as an idea from Classical man. His finance was one of provisional expedients made rule and habit. The wealthy burgher of Athens and Rome could be burdened with the equipment of war-ships. The political power of the Roman ædile (and his debts) rested on the fact that he not only produced the games and the streets and the buildings, but paid for them too—of course, he could recoup himself later by plundering his province. Sources of income were thought of only when the need of income presented itself, and then drawn upon, without any regard for the future, as the moment required—even at the cost of entirely destroying them. Plunder of the treasures of one’s own temples, sea-piracy against one’s own city, confiscation of the wealth of one’s own fellow-citizens were everyday methods of finance. If surpluses were available, they were distributed to the citizens—a proceeding to which plenty of people besides Eubulus of Athens owed their popularity.⁠⁹¹⁶ Budgets were as unknown as any other part of financial policy. The “economic management” of Roman provinces was a system of robbery, public and private, practised by senators and financiers without the slightest consideration as to whether the exported values could be replaced. Never did Classical man think of systematically intensifying his economic life, but ever looked to the result of the moment, the tangible quantum of cash. Imperial Rome would have gone down in ruin had it not been fortunate enough to possess in old Egypt a Civilization that had for a thousand years thought of nothing but the organization of its economy. The Roman neither comprehended nor was capable of copying this style of life,⁠⁹¹⁷ but the accident that Egypt provided the political possessor of this fellah-world with an inexhaustible source of gold rendered it unnecessary for him to make a settled habit of proscription at home; the last of these financial operations in massacre-form was that of 43, shortly before the incorporation of Egypt.⁠⁹¹⁸ The amassed gold of Asia Minor that Brutus and Cassius were then bringing up, which meant an army and the dominion of the world, made it necessary to put to the ban some two thousand of the richest inhabitants of Italy, whose heads were brought to the Forum in sacks for the offered rewards. It was no longer possible to spare even relatives, children, and grey-heads, or people who had never concerned themselves with politics. It was enough that they possessed a stock of cash and that the yield would otherwise have been too small.

But with the extinction of the Classical world-feeling in the early Imperial age, this mode of thinking in money disappeared also. Coins again became wares—because men were again living the peasant life⁠⁹¹⁹—and this explains the immense outflow of gold into the farther East after Hadrian’s reign, which has hitherto been unaccountable. And as economic life in forms of gold-streams was extinguished in the upheaval of a young Culture, so also the slave ceased to be money, and the ebb of the gold was paralleled by that mass-emancipation of the slaves which numerous Imperial laws, from Augustus’s reign onwards, tried in vain to check—till under Diocletian, in whose famous maximum tariff⁠⁹²⁰ money-economy was no longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to exist.