Reification, Resistance, and Ironic Empiricism in Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money

Abstract

This essay examines Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money in relation to certain themes in the Marxian philosophical tradition. It first examines Simmel’s thoroughgoing and antiessentialist epistemology of exchange. It then looks at a contrary movement taken by Simmel’s thought, in which he seems to posit an absolute objectivity in an almost Kantian vein. Finally, it explains Simmel’s position through a look at his theory of capitalist reification and the necessary and ironic resistance that reification implies for a critical theory of society.