ABSTRACT
The other day, I was struggling to explain the idea of money to my class in political philosophy. I assayed the following rather cliche-ridden approach. First, you have a barter economy. But that turns out to be inconvenient, because it’s hard to drag around bushels of corn or whatever you may have of value when you need to obtain things. So money is introduced as specie: something that has intrinsic value, such as gold. The economy is still essentially on a barter basis, only now gold coinage (for example) is introduced as a universal commodity that can be bartered for all others. The next stage is that specie itself comes to be represented by (perhaps) notes. Then the notes take on a life of their own, as money becomes more and more abstract. They don’t represent anything, but have value only as a matter of convention. Finally, even the physical notes are dispensed with and exchanges take the form of electronic transfers of nothing at all: a kind of complete vanishing or apotheosis of value into an utter abstraction.
