THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE
(A)
MONEY
I
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 Hume[845]
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 house[851] 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]
II
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
successes[861] 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 biological[863] 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 priesthood[865] 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 exist[871]--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.
III
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 “pos_session_” 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 world[887]--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.
IV
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 politicians[895] 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 Mommsen[898] 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 person[899] 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.
V
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 life[919]--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 tariff[920] money-economy was no
longer the standpoint, the type of the Classical slave had ceased to
exist.