I posted a thought about the Georg Simmel's book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY, published in Germany by Duncker and Humblot in 1900. Today I'll add a bit about how that book came to be in English -- indeed, in American English -- where I can read it with ease. As distinct from the slog that getting through actual German would be for me, despite my two years of High School German classes! The book began as a lecture delivered by Simmel in 1889 to a political science seminar at the University of Berlin, a seminar over which Gustav Schmoller presided. Simmel then issued a series of articles on the underlying issue and the book emerged in due course. The first English translation? It didn't happen until more than three quarters of a century later, a full 89 years since that first lecture -- it was in 1978, brought out by Routledge, translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. There have been more recent editions. But ... why the long delay?...
I've written a few posts here about my theory of a recent but receding golden age in philosophy, the period roughly from 1880 to 1920. Consider this comment an addition to that line of thought. I have been reading a book by Georg Simmel (1858 - 1918), a German philosopher within the neo-Kantian movement of the late nineteenth century. The book that drew my particular interest is his PHILOSOPHY OF MONEY [Philosophie des Geldes] published in 1900, squarely in the middle of the golden age I've postulated. I will introduce the book here, and in tomorrow's post I hope to come at it from a different angle. The first thing that one has to know about Simmel's philosophy of money is that it is NOT a theory of economic value in the manner of Ricardo or Marx. Simmel was about 25 when Marx died -- he was of a later generation but within the same broad Germanic tradition. Still, he was not doing economic theory in the way Marx was. He was doing epistemology, appl...