II: A Grammar of Abstraction

On the idea that money is a 'measure' in Hegel, Marx, and Aristotle.

In his characteristic fashion, Hegel provides one of the most clarifying treatments of the idea that money is most basically a form of measure and that what it measures is an abstraction. In a comment he offers in the course of his discussion of Abstract Right, Hegel writes:

If one considers the concept of value, the thing itself is regarded merely as a sign, and not as itself but as what it is worth. A bill of exchange, for example, does not represent its quality as paper, but is merely a sign representing another universal, namely value. The value of a thing can vary greatly in relation to need; but if one wishes to express not the specific nature of its value but its value in the abstract, this is expressed as money. Money can represent [repräsentiert] anything, but since it does not represent [darstellt] the need itself but is only a sign in place of it, it is itself governed in turn by the specific value which it merely expresses in the abstract.¹

Hegel bundles a number of closely connected claims into the space of this short remark. When we buy or sell goods and services, he suggests, we are doing something more complex than we might first be tempted to think. We are participating in what he calls an ‘actually-existing’ [wirklich] process of abstraction, a version of the “exchange abstraction” spelled out more explicitly by Georg Simmel and Alfred Sohn-Rethel in their respective readings of Marx. The act of exchanging one thing for something else, in other words, ‘abstracts from’ or ‘sets aside’ the specific qualities of those things in favor of a quantity—a value. It further abstracts from the values we might individually assign to our goods and services in favor of the value they represent “in the abstract”—the value that dictates the price they can command on the market. To borrow Marx’s idiom, we might say that the act of buying and selling abstracts from the “use values” of commodities in favor of their “exchange values.” Neither of these abstractions, according to Hegel, take place primarily in the minds of the buyer or the seller. They are available to both parties because an abstract universal—value—is already made manifest in a concrete form. The concrete form it takes is money—a thing “designated as universal” that lacks any “specific determination of utility” because it “counts only as value.”

Money, then, is a “sign” [Zeichen]; it indexes or indicates something other than itself. Money can ‘represent’ or ‘stand for’ anything it can buy, but Hegel implies that we misunderstand its power of representation if we take ‘representation’ to mean that it signifies or depicts those commodities themselves. Throughout the passage, Hegel oscillates between two German verbs, ‘repräsentieren’ and ‘darstellen.’ The difference between them turns out to be essential to his point. Money can substitute for—“repräsentiert”—commodities, and commodities can substitute for—“repräsentiert”—money. The two can take one another’s place without signifying or depicting one another. They can do this because both money and commodities are signs that signify—“darstellt”—something else. This ‘something else’ is what people really want when they think they want money; what people really want is value.

What is it that Hegel imagines people want under the name ‘value?’ Later in the same passage, Hegel points out that the value of goods and services is analytically distinct from those goods and services themselves. “It is indeed possible,” he writes, “to be the owner of a thing without at the same time being the owner of its value.” The situation he offers as an illustration is drawn from his repertoire of so-called “feudal” forms of land tenure. “A family which cannot sell or mortgage its estate,” he tells his readers, “is not the proprietor of its value.” Value, in other words, appears only when an owner wields power to transfer their ownership to somebody else. Importantly, Hegel’s example here is not a tenant, but a landlord—someone for whom ownership of the land likely affords substantial revenues in cash and kind. Because the owner of an entail cannot alienate ownership of their entailed land at will, the money their ownership enables them to accrue remains separate from the price the land could command at point of sale.

The concept of value, then, is bound up with a specific understanding of property; it is bound up with the idea that something is fully ‘mine’ exactly to the extent that it is within my power to alienate or dispose of it at will. “Ownership,” Hegel insists, means nothing less than “free and complete ownership,” by definition. Free and complete ownership, in turn, entails nothing less than unburdened ownership—ownership unencumbered by competing or divided claims that might limit an owner’s ability to make something an object of their will precisely by walking away from it. Hegel recognizes, of course, that this sort of ownership, if it exists at all, is something of a special case. The overwhelming weight of legal history suggests that the norm has been to treat most forms of ownership—especially in land—as both divisible and burdenable, subject to arrangements like usufruct, liens, and co-ownership arrangements that place hard limits on each owners’ ability to dispose of their property in any way they happen to please. Hegel, however, characterizes these partial forms of property as “out of keeping with the concept of property,” which is why he can quip that “it is only since yesterday, so to speak, that the freedom of property has been recognized here and there as a principle.” Value is making its debut on the world stage precisely because these “feudal” forms of property are now in the process of finally passing away.

Hegel’s talk of substitution and signification draws attention to the essentially semiotic character of his discussion of money. It is important to note, however, that there are two distinct semiotic relationships underlying his account, not just one. Colin Drumm has pointed out that the difference between the semiotic relationships we might attribute to money mirrors a distinction made by the late Russian linguist Roman Jakobsen. In a 1956 essay entitled “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,”Jakobsen distinguished what he took to be two primary poles of sign systems: metonymy and metaphor. Both poles find expression in Hegel’s treatment, roughly corresponding to Hegel’s use of repräsentieren and darstellen, respectively.

If we focus on the relationship between money and goods, what we find is a case of metonymy. In metonymy, a sign stands for another sign on the basis of contiguity—in other words, on the basis of the fact that they often appear near or alongside one another. If I refer to the passing of time as “the ticking of the clock,” for example, then the reason you can understand me is not because time is in any way similar to the sound made by a clock. It is because when we talk about time, we tend to talk about clocks too. We might even make use of one to talk about it. ‘Ticking’ and ‘time’ are related by an act of substitution. Ticking takes time’s place in the sentence. In a similar way, money substitutes for commodities and commodities substitute for money. When we buy or sell goods, money and commodities take one another’s place; where once there was money, now there is a commodity, and where the commodity was, now money is. Each stands for its counterpart only in the sense that by means of one we hope we can make the other appear.

If we shift our focus and examine the relationship between money, goods, and value, what we find is a case of metaphor instead. In metaphor, a sign refers to another sign on the basis of similarity—more specifically, on the basis of the fact that they share signification. If I tell you that “time is the fire in which we burn,” you will not understand me unless you can supply something time and fire both signify. Perhaps you share my sense that ‘time’ and ‘fire’ both threaten to decompose our bodies and hasten our deaths. ‘Time’ and ‘fire’ are related by an act of predication; a common term is predicated of both, and the fact that each bear a relation to this common term is what enables them to substitute for one another. In much the same way, Hegel insists that value is predicated of money and goods alike.

Hegel’s discussion of value—much like Marx’s after him—is framed in response to his studies of French and English political economy. To possess a theory of value of the kind the political economists were after is to possess a theory of the identity of the common term that money measures or metaphorizes. In order to satisfy the demands of the question, it would have to be a theory about the ‘substance’ at stake in appeals to value and the ‘form’ in which this substance takes on a quantitative character. And as Drumm has pointed out elsewhere, the concept of ‘value’ that political economy was preoccupied with setting on solid ground corresponds to what contemporary economists refer to as ‘absolute’ as opposed to ‘relative,’ or ‘positional’ value. To say that value has an absolute dimension, in these terms, is not to say that it is eternal, invariant, or unchanging. It is simply to say that ‘value’ refers to a magnitude that is indifferent to the identities of the parties involved in transacting it. In Hegel’s own terminology, we might prefer to say that the value to which money supposedly refers is ‘abstract’ in the specific sense that it is ‘impersonal’ rather than ‘personal’ in character. All other things being equal—a situation that even the political economists understood was far from assured—every purchase and sale should be reversible in a highly specific sense. When determining the value of goods and services, it should not matter which of the involved parties happens to be the seller and which happens to be the buyer. If it does, this means that its ‘price’ has come untethered from its ‘value.’ In semiotic terms: the metaphor has been allowed to drift.

The idea that money traffics in metaphor is no innovation on Hegel’s part. If anything, it supplies something like the consensus approach to money in the history of Western philosophy since Aristotle. In a heavily cited passage from Book V of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that money is a “middle term”—μέσον [meson]—or “measure”—μέτρον [metron]. “Money,” he writes, “serves as a measure which makes things commensurable and so reduces them to equality.” Money makes common measure between commodities by establishing a relation between them “κατ᾽ ἀναλογίαν” [kat’ analogian], “according to analogy.” In keeping with his treatment in both the Poetics and the Rhetoric, this means the metaphor money makes belongs to the last of Aristotle’s four species of metaphor: so-called ‘analogies of proportion.’ More than this, it means that exchange, μεταβλητική [metablêtikê], offers an example of what Aristotle takes to be the most characteristic species of metaphor; analogy is the species of metaphor that serves as the instructional paradigm for the broader genus to which it belongs.

The importance of proportion, however, illuminates a crucial point of divergence between Hegel and Aristotle. Money proliferates by metaphor for both writers, but the metaphor that money makes possible is by no means the same one. To establish proportional analogy, on Aristotle’s account, it is not enough to have two terms to compare, ‘money’ and ‘commodities.’ Aristotelian analogy establishes a relation between terms on the basis of a relation between relations, and each relation relates two terms of its own. To use his own example: “let A be a builder, B a shoemaker, C a house, and D a shoe.” Proportion, in this case, does not establish a direct comparison between C and D, houses and shoes. The comparison it establishes is between what shoes represent for the builder and what houses represent for the shoemaker—a comparison, Aristotle tells us, between the “χρεία” [chreia] or “use” each one has for the products of the other’s labor. After all, “an association for interchange of services is not formed between two physicians, but between a physician and a farmer, and generally between persons who are different.” For Hegel, the market value of a commodity is fundamentally impersonal. For Aristotle, I cannot know what something is worth unless I know who wants to buy it.

On both accounts, however, it is the peculiar character of money that enables it to reflect a common measure—in Aristotle’s terms συμμετρία [summetríā], ‘commensuration’ or ‘due proportion’—between otherwise incommensurable goods and services. Later in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel tells us that money alone makes it possible to determine a numerical ratio, or quantity, at which things that differ in quality can be made interchangeable for one another. Whether the comparison is proportional or direct, personal or impersonal, both writers insist that it is only the fact that money can take the place of either term that enables us to say there is some amount of money that can make equitable compensation for a house. For both, the feature of money that makes this possible—its ‘moneyness,’ so to speak—is its liquidity.

Liquidity, here, refers to the ease with which something can be exchanged for something else without paying a price for the loss of the ability to use it or the fact that the recipient might prefer to receive an entirely different thing. A shoe, Aristotle explains in the Politics, has two uses; it can be worn as a shoe, but it can also be given away to get something in return. By selling a shoe, the seller forgoes the ability to wear it. Moreover, the seller risks finding out that the buyer is not in the market for shoes at all. What makes money unique, both writers insist, is that it has only one use, not two. By designating something as money, we cordon it off, setting aside the other, illiquid uses to which we might put it. Gold, for instance, is not especially liquid when it is incorporated into electronic circuitry; paper is not especially liquid when it takes the form of a book instead of a bill. Both writers suggest that money’s only value is its liquidity, and that this is why it can translate quality into quantity by offering itself as a quantum. Money establishes a unit that quantity can be a quantity of, since there is no quality common to goods and services that could be measured by a simple magnitude. But money can only do this because it promises to procure goods and services that are not money themselves, goods and services whose usefulness has not been suspended in service of their liquidity. Aristotle makes this point by appealing to the mythical King Midas: a man rich in money who has nothing else will still starve if he cannot spend it. In semiotic terms we might say that even if it is metaphor that makes metonymy possible, it is metonymy that makes metaphor desirable.

When E.P.  Thompson insists that over the past five to seven hundred years time and money have become interchangeable with one another, the meaning of his insistence can be clarified in the terms Hegel has put on the table. What the rise to prominence of abstract time is supposed to explain, after all, is not so much the transformation of time into money as the transformation of time into the measure of the worker’s claim to compensation, specifically—a claim that can be made the object of an explicit negotiation between a buyer and a seller, an employer and an employee. “Those who are employed,” E.P. Thompson writes, “experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own.’” Where labor is paid by the day or the hour, in other words, time submits to the grammar of ‘mine’ and ‘yours.’ As Hegel puts it:

I can alienate individual products of my particular physical and mental skills and active capabilities to someone else and allow him to use them for a limited period, because, provided they are subject to this limitation, they acquire an external relationship to my totality and universality. By alienating the whole of my time, as made concrete through work, and the totality of my production, I would be making the substantial quality of the latter, i.e. my universal activity and actuality or my personality itself, into someone else’s property.²

By selling the use of my capacities for a limited time and under definite terms—essentially, by renting myself out—I make time the measure of my labor and money the measure of my time. Limitation transforms my labor into something I can own in the strict sense, because it transforms it into something I am able to leave behind. For Hegel, this brings us to the very root of the metaphor money represents. Money, after all, depicts—stellt dar—value. And value, Hegel tells his students in a lecture course delivered while writing the Philosophy of Right, “depends on the labor needed to produce the thing.”³ In a move most likely borrowed from an amalgam of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say, Hegel insists that value is determined by considerations like “the art and effort involved, the rarity of the object,” factors that make it either easy or difficult to acquire what is for sale on one’s own. Money, he suggests, has been a metaphor for labor all along; labor is the underlying security on which money places a price. But only in modernity has money finally begun to accord with its own idea—only, that is, with the proliferation of a wage relation given novel significance by the proliferation of undivided ownership claims to its various products.

It is highly symptomatic, then, that despite foreshadowing Hegel’s insistence that money is a metaphor, Aristotle offers no analogue for ‘value’ in either the Politics or the Nichomachean Ethics. Money passes from one hand to the next as a substitute for use—a “ὑπάλλαγμα τῆς χρείας” [hypállagma tês chreias]. But ‘use,’ what modern translators sometimes render ‘need’ or ‘demand,’ is neither a sign nor substitute for anything other than itself. At an early moment in Capital, Marx tells his readers that the “secret” of value—the equality of human labor power—remained opaque to Aristotle because Greek society was predicated on the inequality of persons. It relied on the concrete and specialized techniques peculiar to an artisanal division of labor and, more importantly, it relied on the coercive inequality of slave labor.⁴ Positionality, in other words, had yet to give way to the absolute. Because of this, Aristotle could not help but fail to comprehend what it was that goods and services had in common with one another—the common predicate for which money was a metaphor. His analysis “falters” after uncovering the simple fact of equivalence, unable to penetrate its basis for want of a concept of value. Unable to see what underlies the equality of goods and services in exchange, he had no way to account for the inequality that flows from the circumstances of their production and accumulation. The meaning of Aristotle’s metaphor, Marx implies, would have to wait for modern readers to make good on it.

1. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Allen Wood, §63 [93]Z. Emphasis mine.

2. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Allen Wood, § 67 [97]. Emphasis in original.

3. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science, 87. 

4. Marx, Capital, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes, 151-152.