Georg Simmel, A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value

Georg Simmel, “A Chapter in the Philosophy of Value,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 5 (Mar., 1900), pp. 577-603

p. 577: “The practically effective value is conferred upon the object, not merely by its own desirability, but by the desirability of another object... Not merely the relationship to the receptive subjects characterizes this value, but also the fact that it arrives at this relationship only at the price of a sacrifice.”

p. 578: “Desire and the feeling of the agent stand, to be sure, as the motor energy behind all this, but from this in and of itself this value form could not proceed. It rather comes only from the reciprocal counterbalancing of the objects.” – that is, for Simmel objects acquire value, first, because they are desired and, second, because they exist in ‘assemblages’.

Simmel actually speaks of ‘assemblages’ – in his theory, the exchange value appears only as part of a complex system in which people and things are intrinsically interrelated. (581-583) While he gives certain precedence to people’s desires (speaking of enjoyment and sacrifice as the two driving forces of any economy), exchange value, the basis of economy, does not appear without an object. There is economy even in the cases when “primitive economic people” are not involved in the trade among each other: “the party with whom he contracts is not a sec- ond sentient being, but the natural order and regularity of things, which no more satisfy our desires without a sacrifice on our part than would another person.” (582)

p. 588: “The economic form of the value stands between two boundaries: on the one hand, the desire for the object, which attaches itself to the anticipated feeling of satisfaction from its possession and enjoyment; on the other hand, to this enjoyment itself, which, exactly considered, is not an economic act.”

p. 589: Argues that desire becomes an important economic (and arguably cultural) phenomenon only because satisfaction of desire cannot be immediate and should undergo struggle and diminution. – curiously, this is why Soviet people remember so well everything they had to buy.

p. 590: “Kant once summarized his Theory of Knowledge in the proposition: "The conditions of experience are at the same time the conditions of the objects of experience." By this he meant that the process which we call experience and the conceptions which constitute its contents or objects are subject to the selfsame laws of the reason. The objects can come into our experience, that is, be experienced by us, because they are conceptions in us; and the same energy which makes and defines the experience has also manifested itself in the structure of the objects.”

p. 593: why it is important that things are engaged in economic systems/networks: “The mere desire for an object does not lead to this valuation, since it finds in itself alone no measure. Only the comparison of desires, that is, the exchangeability of their objects, fixes each of the same as a value defined in accordance with its scale, that is, an economic value.”

The fact that any particular object is desired is the driving force of its economic value, but the desire and economic value do not engage into a direct cause-and-effect relationship: there is a whole chain of intermediaries (the system of economy) between them (p. 594): “It is always the relation of the desires to each other, realized in exchange, which makes their objects economic values.” (599)

Simmel ends by discussing the role of scarcity in the establishment of value – might be very relevant for the role of commodities in late Soviet history. Things are so valuable because they are so scarce. Since they are scarce, their values increases – and the Soviet Union becomes a very materialistic (but not in the Marxist meaning of this term) society.