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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Money lowers all the gods of mankind and transforms them into a commodity. Money is the universal self-constituting value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world, both the human world and nature, of its own peculiar value. Money is the essence of man's work and existence, alienated from Man, and this alien essence dominates him and he prays to it.
Karl Marx, On the Jewish QuestionThe humanist critićism of the market often focuses on the risk that the market's reliance on exchange will lead us to think of each other as instrumental items of exchange. In Chapter 9 I pointed out the way exchange helped people to achieve a sense of personal control; here we examine whether the price of exchange is “the commodification” of friendships. Exchange has its costs, but they are not the devaluation of friendship. It is not the case that because we exchange goods, we think about people in the same way as we think about goods, or that people are degraded by taking part in the processes of exchanging goods for money.
The cash nexus among people
Society has long been embarked on a process of moving from status to contract (Maine), from gemeinschaft to gesselschaft (Tönnies), from communal to associative relations (Weber).
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