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What Is Money?

Summary/Abstract: As most philosophers regarded money with a certain distrust or even contempt, the question of the nature of money was not addressed from a philosophical perspective until G. Simmel wrote The Philosophy of Money (1900). Even 19th-century thinkers clung to the idea of money as a commodity, or, for Marx, as a “mask of value”. This idea is rather misleading, as money, in comparison with commodities, always flows in the opposite direction, is not consumed but rather circulates, and can be represented by fewer and fewer material tokens, by fiduciary money, or even by invisible computer bytes. On the other hand, it appears to be a sort of institutionalised mutual trust, the validity of which is attested to daily by the willingness (or unwillingness) of citizens to accept it as payment.

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