ABSTRACT
I Anyone attempting to examine the economic foundations of The Philosophy of Money is immediately confronted with a number of difficulties. The first is Simmel’s own disclaimer in the preface that ‘not a single line of these investigations is meant to be a statement about economics’.1 This statement is reinforced in the self-advertisement for the book when it first appeared in 1900. There, in its opening sentence, Simmel declares that it is ‘a book, in which I attempt to indicate the intellectual foundations and the intellectual significance of economic life’.2 Hence, it does not deal directly with economic theory as such. This reading is again confirmed in the ‘Preface’. The economic phenomena of value, exchange, production and the like ‘which economics views from one standpoint, are here viewed from another’. Simmel questions ‘the apparent justification for regarding them simply as “economic facts”’.3 As with other one-sided, discipline-specific treatments of phenomena so too, for instance,
Simmel’s approach to his subject matter is therefore not confined to a single disciplinary orientation; rather it is interdisciplinary.
