Forms of Monetary Alienation. Current Reflections from Georg Simmel

Abstract

In this text we intend to go over some of the most relevant historical expressions regarding the relationship between money, alienation, suffering and happiness, draw from the reflections of Georg Simmel, without ignoring the contributions of thinkers such as Aristotle, Hume or even Adam Smith. Taking as a starting point the Greek paradigm of the classical polis, the trajectory will include some of the ways in which the relationship between these terms was understood in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Early Modernity and the Late Modernity, advancing some hypotheses about Contemporaneity. We will review, later, Simmel’s ideas around money in Modernity to give way to the consideration of its “pathological” or alienated forms. We will propose a nomination for each of them and pay special attention to the figure of the miser (or avaricious) by virtue of the preeminence that it has in the Simmelian text. The article will conclude by suggesting a reinterpretation of these three pathological forms, or alienated modalities of money-based happiness, in contemporary neoliberal capitalism.