Zur Psychologie des Geldes

by Georg Simmel

Book Overview

With a new foreword by Charles Lemert'Its greatness...lies in ceaseless and varied use of the money form to unearth and conceptually reveal incommensurabilities of all kinds, in social reality fully... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 8027312140
• ISBN13: 9788027312146
• Release Date: April 2018
• Publisher: E-Artnow
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

for those of us who love topic sentences

I was privileged to read this just after it was translated and found it to be even more insight-filled than the other Simmel i had found and loved. His style of laying out like rails concept after concept and not needing to tell stories fits my way of thinking... Jesus taught the crowds and his antagonists with parables; he taught the Twelve by giving them the abstract principles underlying...if you learn in that manner, Simmel is a treat, and i may be biased, but Simmel to me is just so much more right, so much closer to explaining what we have seen in the last hundred years than Marx... I would lay this book down next to Adam Smith for a more enlightening experience... If you ever have wondered how money is the distillate of all that can be acquired or produced which can truly be called "human", this is the best book i know that explains that relationship.

great service

I ordered a copy of this book second-hand from Bibliofind. When it hadn't arrived two weeks later, I wrote in to ask what happened; they told me it had been lost in the mail, and sent me a new (not used) copy for no extra fee. I was very satisfied.

Money as the great symbol of social life!

This remarkable work, published in 1900, is Georg Simmel's magnum opus given the fact that it contains most key ideas of this charismatic and versatile thinker. It is bulky, and at points very difficult to penetrate through,since the author's literary style -although very enjoyable- tends to abstract from the clarity of the point at hand. This work may be seen as a supplement to Marx's "Capital". Simmel deals with money at various levels of abstraction. He discusses money from an economic, philosophical, sociological and psychological perspective in an admirable attempt to develop via the concept of money a modern world-view. Chapter One is the most difficult since it explores Simmel's theory of value, using BOTH classical political economy and the Marxian theory of value. Then, he proceeds in order to develop it as a symbol of a relational epistemology (drawing heavily on Kant, Hegel and Spinoza). The following parts of the book associate money with exchange as a sociological category of interaction and display Simmel at his very best in the lengthy discussion of money in relation to personal values (dowry, prostitution, bribery etc.). Additionally, Simmel explores the axiological dislocations that take place in human consciousness and fail to address correctly the means-ends aspect of money's relationship to commodities. In this wonderful section, Simmel discloses the alienating attitudes of extravagance, greed, avarice, cynicism and indifference. Last, but not least, Simmel connects money to modernity pulling -albeit elliptically- all the threads of the previous arguments together. A book of great sociological and philosophical interest, full of dazzling dialectics, free of dogmatism and definitely one of humanity's most complete statements on "money"!