Money Wisdom #99

"Wergeld expressed the two meanings of "worth" that derive from the two basic elements of social structure: the utilitarian and the moral."

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.92

Money Wisdom #98

"Money lies behind coinage."

Grierson (1977) p.12 quoted in Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.89

Money Wisdom #97

"...the economic ties that are constituted by the vast network of credits and debts fundamentally comprise a 'moral' network that depends on the keeping of promises."

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.77

Money Wisdom #96

"In short, the monopolistic imposition of a money of account, and a refusal to accept any other than the approved credit tokens of the issuer, go hand-in-hand with the monopolization of physical force."

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.76

Money Wisdom #95

"The identity between quantity and quality, which is found in Measure, is at first only implicit, and not yet explicitly realised. In other words, these two categories, which unite in Measure, each claim an independent authority."

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich The Logic. Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1874) p.108-109

Money Wisdom #94

"Furthermore, this [orthodox] approach strongly implies a teleological, functionalist explanation of both money's origins and its continued existence. It is held that money evolved to overcome costly inefficiency in market exchange for both individuals and the system as a whole. Money clearly does have efficient consequences, but unless they can be shown to have been in the minds of the earliest users of money, they cannot be taken to be causes of origin. As we shall see, the historic record does not support these conjectures. Moreover, it is also obvious that mere knowledge of money's advantages is not sufficient to bring about a viable monetary system or to guarantee its persistence. Money has definite social and political conditions of existence; it is an 'institutional fact' with 'constitutive rules' (Searle 1995:13). "

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.70

Money Wisdom #93

"Typically, Weber confronts both economic orthodoxy and its socialist critics.* Prices, which in conventional theory are the result of the interplay of supply and demand, are seen as the 'product of conflicts of interest [that] result from power constellations' in 'the struggle for economic existence'. Consequently, money is not economic theory's 'neutral veil' draped over exchange ratios of commodities. Rather, money 'is primarily a weapon in this struggle, and prices are expressions of this struggle, they are instruments in this struggle only as estimated quantifications of relative chances in this struggle'.**

* Weber 1978: 78-80, 107-109    ** Weber 1978: 108

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.67

A Review of Art and Money by Marc Shell

Here's my review of Marc Shell's Art and Money. I've put on amazon here so if you like it, as ever, please do pop over to amazon and 'like' it. I love getting a few 'likes', it really makes my day.

"This is a beautiful book. It's made me into a fan of Marc Shell's work.

I read Shell's 1982 work 'Money, Language and Thought' some months back. I found it a difficult work to digest. I'm not used to the language and style of literary criticism and had read only some of the literature he examined. But I got enough from the book to make me want to read 'Art and Money'.

I was rewarded. Having the image alongside the criticism is hugely effective. The arguments he makes are often complex, but then so is the subject matter. The book leaves you with more questions than it answers. The language used is also at times difficult. But the book is relatively short at 140 pages or so.

You get a sense of a deep-thinking man enthralled with his subject. I found the section on Christianity particularly fascinating. There is an element of psychoanalysis in Shell's work. It takes us to places where no other text on money has. For example, the Myth of Danae and the golden annunciation are scrutinised as representations of sex/money symbolism; a shower of gold from above. The theme of the Holy Grail (covered very well in 'Money, Language and Thought') reoccurs in Art and Money. Like money the Grail is 'both homogeneous and heterogeneous with all things' (p.20). And there is also the thorny issue of usury. That most unnatural form of reproduction, money from itself, is mentioned in several places. Most enthralling was placing it in the context of the immaculate conception.

There's even a chapter on the Holy foreskin.

It's quite an expensive book (I got mine secondhand) but I heartily recommend it. Shell has included some images of his own. I imagined them to be pictures he'd taken on overseas vacations where he just can't stop noticing the links between art and money and enthusiastically pulls out his camera to take a photo, possibly annoying the hell out of his traveling companions. And the book has a sort of on-a-journey feeling, really. It has a tempo to it. And whilst the terrain is challenging, your guide in the form of Shell is hugely well-informed, well-read and fascinated with his subject. You know he could have written a book twenty times as long, but instead composed a travel-log of the most interesting bits of his journey through Art and Money."

Money Wisdom #92

"Money is that 'which purely in itself is of no material use to man but which acquires such an estimation from his opinion of it as to become the universal measure of what is called value' (quoted in Schumpeter 1994 [1954]: 297)"

Sir James Steuart (circa C18th)  quoted in Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.40

Money Wisdom #91

"The labour theory of value committed Marx, and his successors, to a version of the commodity theory of money, with all its attendant errors. To this extent, Marx's general theory of money was mistaken. He could not have been more wrong, and the error could not have been more unequivocally stated. 'The principal difficulty in the analysis of money is surmounted as soon as it is understood that the commodity is the origin of money ' (Marx 1970: 64). Most importantly, this attachment to the labour theory of value of commodity-money prevented Marx from realizing that his theory of capital as a social relation applied also to money."

Geoffrey Ingham The Nature of Money (2004) p.61