I’m just putting this reminder here now that my dissertation is up. I will begin producing paid content alongside free posts, which you can read for £5 a month. I’m officially done for the year at university, so I will be producing more for the blog while also getting my book done. Thanks to our first paid subscriptions, we are also now 34th in Rising History, up from 53rd yesterday. Thanks to all of you for supporting Spenglarian.Perspective.
For Spengler, money is a concept, a theory of mind that places value on things that have no inherent valuation. Because it is a theory of mind, it is also subject to the particular ways of thinking of each culture that produces it. We’ve seen in the previous post on money that the Classical and Western ways of conceiving money are mutually opposed. For Greece, value is inherent in its stable physicality. Gold has inherent value, so it is fashioned into a coin. In the West, value is produced through the concentration of energy and channelling as force, directional force being a concept completely foreign to Greek thought. As a result, Western money, like its politics, science, and mathematics, is dynamic and founded on relations between varying points, while Greek money, again, like its thought and politics, is premised on static substances without a conception of past or future.
In Civilisation, this concept mutates into some grandiose forms. Spengler points towards Western Capitalism as a product of cosmopolitan thinking and Capital as the force that keeps the economy moving and therefore generating value. Contemporary to this in Hellenistic Greece, the economy had a magnetic effect that brought physical coin from around the known world to centres of commerce. In each city-state, Spengler notes the common ideal of Autarkeia in which each polis tried to round its economy off from the rest and be wholly independent of the others, possessing its own internal stream of economics that leaked nothing beyond its sphere of visibility. Spengler contrasts this to the Western notion of the Firm, for-profit organisations that produce and sell things to outsiders outside their sphere to accumulate profits, therefore expanding their own personal capital, and therefore expanding their sphere of influence over their corner of the market. This can be as simple as a local law firm, or as expansive as a multinational megacorporation, but the point is that this style of expansive and exponentially growing economy tends to deliberately reach outwards as far as it can to convert production into energy and influence. If any of modern economics tried to be stable or self-reliant, it risks losing out to other competitors, and its store of value ceases to have meaning outside of circulation.
Classical economics was also short-sighted. If it aimed to bring everything as close to its presence as possible, this also applies temporally as well. Sources of income weren’t considered until they were needed in the moment, prompting desperate, and occasionally self-destructive, means to summon up gold. It was expected of Aediles in Rome to finance the streets and buildings they planned and the games they held, resulting in enormous debts that were often repaid by plundering provinces, such as those of Julius Caesar in Gaul. When surpluses were gained, they followed the example of Eubulus of Athens, who distributed them to the people to gain popularity. The thought of intensifying labour, as a Western manager or businessman would, never occurred to Hellenistic man, and Spengler notes that were Rome to not have had an ancient civilisation that had this instinct, such as Egypt, under its control, it would have steadily plundered its surrounding world and fizzled away quite quickly.
Western monetary thought never once doubts the idea that money must be planned around. As early as the Middle Ages, we see central planning of nations done by exchequers and financiers in England and France, and it was Spain, around the turn of the Late period, that produced double-entry bookkeeping, which revolutionised the storing of monetary values. Capitalism is often directly blamed as the systematic cause of colonialism, but expansion is in the heart of every Socialist or Communist as well. The Labour theory of value acknowledges, around the time the laws of thermodynamics were being devised, that value isn’t inherent to property but is a product of work put into it, just as Locke’s conception of property rights was also enshrined by Labour. Work is energy; therefore, work generates value, which can be measured by money. The need to plan ahead and foresee future events also becomes key to preserving the flow of this abstract capital around future obstacles.
In the early Imperial age onwards, we begin to see the transformation of the empire into a fellah condition. Gold subtly changes from a store of inherent value to a ware again, because the population ceased to be urban and the peasantry was resurging, alongside peasant thinking. Gold possessing value only means something in the town and city cultures because there is a level of abstraction that must take place for these environments to even exist, but back on the land, the problems of man aren’t ideological, spiritual, or political; they are practical and relate to matter-of-fact circumstances. Spengler blames the unusual shift of gold eastwards after Hadrian on this fact. The new world was the Magian one, which had a greater need of gold in its own conception of value, while the Western Roman Empire, outside of its cultural sphere, receded back into more primitive conditions. By the time of Diocletian, we also see the abolition of the slave economy. Men are no longer a measure of value anymore, and their status as tokens in the ancient world changes as it begins to lean harder on Christian conceptions of mankind and money.
What the future of Faustian economics has in store for us, Spengler couldn’t say in his time. Instead, he leaves a second chapter on economics, only around ten pages long, using everything he had established by that point in both volumes to make a critical analysis of the engine of Western society: The Machine. We will explore this next week.