Money Matters: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770–1850 (review)

Economics and intellectual culture—a timely topic, surely. In the humanities today, money is not everything—it is the only thing, apparently, as budget cuts hit higher education across the United States. Instead of understanding internationally competitive education as an investment into this country's future, politicians abandon long-term planning for short-term electability as voters are seduced by populist anti-tax rhetoric and short-sighted selfishness. Unhappily, those employed in higher education are far too quick to shoulder some of the blame themselves, whether as a sin of omission (they only reached students and not their neighbors, they did not train better politicians, they did not lobby enough) or as sins of commission (they taught students to care only for their own place on the grading curve). Of course, the playing field is not exactly level if the essentially non-profit sector of education is expected to compete for the valuable attention of those temporarily elected to offices that are increasingly about fund-raising for the next election.

Indeed, it can seem as if money is the only thing that matters. As the industrial and intellectual output of the 21^st-century knowledge society becomes increasingly abstract, money lets the social character of labor appear. Some lament that in an age of spectacular speculation, money is the only way to keep score in sports, culture, business, and other areas of life, since globalization has made us less sure of any other commonly shared values. We also live by modern categories of nationality and race, and more ancient ones of religion and gender, but they are increasingly permeated and connected by the one thing that enables almost any exchange: money. Tracking production and exchange, being circulated and hoarded and borrowed, subject to secondary and tertiary speculations—there is no doubt that despite and by dint of all of its abstractions, in the current world system money truly matters. As such, plenty of attention is being paid, no pun intended, to how central money is to capitalism.

But it was not always thus. There are pockets of cultural memory that can recall and tell how this apparently universal system developed, what ideas went into forging it, and what alternatives were considered or rejected. Obviously, we may consider academia one such pocket of knowledge, one such archive of alternative systems and competing ideas. Yet money matters no less in academia, where it is a pleasure to find historical and conceptual inquiry into the cultural imaginary that demonstrates in close readings the work of economic abstraction in literature and speculative idealism, when economic debates were indeed justifiably a branch of philosophy and the humanities. Richard T. Gray chose as a subtitle for his book Money Matters what reads to some of us today like an interdisciplinary pairing: Economics and the German Cultural Imagination, 1770–1850. This work is an outstanding example for a new economic bent in the humanities, rooted in human communicative action and exchange. Gray's book progresses from a sage introduction into 18^th-century economics and intellectual culture that focuses on semiosis, via romantic theories of circulation and exchange, on to literary economies in canonical texts by Jung-Stilling, Chamisso, Droste-Hülshoff, Stifter, and of course Goethe. To call them canonical texts is not to cordon them off from intellectual history, but to emphasize Gray's astounding ability to find current concerns as well as historical constellations reflected and grounded in texts that have to prove their mettle in generation after generation of academic study. (Nonetheless, Gray's remarkable restraint with footnotes is an unusual trait in academia.) To exchange money for words and words for money is of course not just characteristic of the knowledge society of the 21^st century, but part of the very system of currency that is predicated on speech acts such as the promise to pay the bearer of a bank note. Gray invokes Lavater and Leibniz, Locke and Hume...