The Social Meaning of Money

Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies

Viviana A. Zelizer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691237008
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A dollar is a dollar—or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing relations to cold, hard cash. After all, it's just money. Or is it? Distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author Viviana Zelizer argues against this conventional wisdom. She shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place. Zelizer concentrates on domestic transactions, bestowals of gifts and charitable donations in order to show how individuals, families, governments, and businesses have all prescribed social meaning to money in ways previously unimagined.

1

The Marking of Money

MONEY MULTIPLIES. Despite the commonsense idea that “a dollar is a dollar is a dollar,” everywhere we look people are constantly creating different kinds of money. This book explains the remarkably various ways in which people identify, classify, organize, use, segregate, manufacture, design, store, and even decorate monies as they cope with their multiple social relations. It is a powerful ideology of our time that money is a single, interchangeable, absolutely impersonal instrument—the very essence of our rationalizing modern civilization. Money’s “colorlessness,” as Georg Simmel saw it at the turn of the twentieth century, repainted the modern world into an “evenly flat and gray tone.” All meaningful nuances were stamped out by the new quantitative logic that asked only “how much,” but not “what and how.” Or as Gertrude Stein put it more succinctly a few decades later, “Whether you like it or whether you do not money is money and that is all there is about it.”¹

Money, according to this conception, also destroys, necessarily replacing personal bonds with calculative instrumental ties, corrupting cultural meanings with materialist concerns. Indeed, from Karl Marx to Jürgen Habermas, from Georg Simmel to Robert Bellah, observers of commercialization in Western countries have thought they saw devastating consequences of money’s irresistible spread: the inexorable homogenization and flattening of social ties. Conservatives have deplored the moral decay brought by prosperity while radicals have condemned capitalism’s dehumanization, but both have seen the swelling cash nexus as the source of evil.

This book examines changes in the public and private uses of money in the United States between 1870 and 1930. Measured by the range of commodities and services available for cash, the commercialization of American life has unquestionably advanced during the twentieth century. The question, however, is whether or not the expansion of monetary exchange works the way it is supposed to, whether or not it has the consequences ordinarily attributed to it. As monetary transactions multiply, do they render social life cold, distant, and calculating? The standard answer has been an emphatic yes. This book contests such strongly held assumptions. It shows how at each step in money’s advance, people have reshaped their commercial transactions, introduced new distinctions, invented their own special forms of currency, earmarked money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporated money into personalized webs of friendship, family relations, interactions with authorities, and forays through shops and businesses.

Consider, for instance, how we distinguish a lottery winning from an ordinary paycheck, or from an inheritance. A thousand dollars won in the stock market do not “add up” in the same way as $1,000 stolen from a bank, or $1,000 borrowed from a friend. A wage earner’s first paycheck is not the exact equivalent of the fiftieth or even the second. The money we obtain as compensation for an accident is quite different from our royalties for a book. And royalties gained from a murderer’s memoirs fall into a separate moral category from royalties earned by a scientific text.

Unlike an “honest dollar,” “dirty” money is stained by its ethically dubious origins. Thus the ubiquitous metaphor: to launder money. One striking example of dirty money comes from the practices of prostitutes. A study of the Oslo prostitution market in the 1980s found a “divided economy” among many of the women: welfare money, health benefits, or other legal income were carefully budgeted, spent for the “straight life,” to pay rent and bills. Prostitution money, on the other hand, was quickly squandered on “going out,” on drugs, alcohol, and clothes. Paradoxically, the study notes, the women “sweat over, add up, and budget the legal money though the ends will never meet, while simultaneously thousands of crowns can be spent on ‘going out.’” Dirty money, it seems, “burns a hole in your pocket and has to be used quickly.”²

Marty, a new Philadelphia gang recruit during the 1950s, provides a different version of moral earmarking. When asked by his family-services social worker why he would donate to his church the twenty-five cents his mother gave him but not the money he got from the gang’s robberies, Marty was clear, “Oh no, that is bad money; that is not honest money.” While stolen monies were sullied, his mother’s hard-earned money was “honest” and “he could offer it to God.”³ Sometimes, however, “dirty money” is laundered morally by donating a portion to some worthy cause. Consider, however, how that donation differs from an office subscription, a church collection, synagogue dues, or university bequests. Still other monies circulate as different sorts of gifts—a check for a nephew’s wedding, a Christmas bonus to an employee, Hanukkah gelt for a child, a waiter’s tip. Within our households, a wife’s income is often distinguished from her husband’s, and surely from her child’s. Children’s monies, too, have multiple meanings: an allowance does not count the same way as the money earned by baby sitting.

Think, finally, of the remarkable range of invented monies we exchange: food stamps for the poor, supermarket coupons for the ordinary consumer, prison scrip for inmates, therapeutic tokens for the mentally ill, military currency for soldiers, chips for gamblers, lunch tickets for institutional canteens, gift certificates for celebrations. Both within the range set by governmental currencies and among the other forms of money created for special purposes, distinction and multiplication appear on every hand.

Yet we know remarkably little about the social life of money. Social scientists treat money paradoxically: although money is considered a basic element of modern society, as a sociological category it remains unanalyzed. Money is ignored, Randall Collins has suggested, “as if it were not sociological enough.” The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences devotes over thirty pages to money, but not one to its social characteristics. There are essays on the economic effect of money, on quantity theory, on velocity of circulation, and on monetary reform, but nothing on money as réalité sociale, in Simiand’s apt term. Oddly, while sociologists have long recognized social time and social space, social money has eluded them. Sorokin’s Sociocultural Causality, Space, Time, for instance, devotes separate chapters to the qualitative heterogeneity of time and space, but only a few speculative lines to the possible multiple symbolism of money.⁴

As a result, money as an intellectual construct remains confined primarily to the economists’ domain—a world in which unfettered individuals behave as rational participants in market transactions, making distinctions only of price and quantity, a dispassionate sphere where all monies are alike. To be sure, Thorstein Veblen alerted us to the social meaning of what money buys; and, more recently, a new literature on the culture of consumption boldly reverses our understanding of modern commodities.⁵ The new revisionist approach uncovers the symbolic meanings of commercial goods, but, curiously, leaves the cultural independence and power of money unquestioned.

Ironically, popular conceptions of money seem to be wiser than academic sociology. In their everyday existence, people understand that money is not really fungible, that despite the anonymity of dollar bills, not all dollars are equal or interchangeable. We routinely assign different meanings and separate uses to particular monies. Sometimes the earmarking is quite concrete; for instance, Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel’s study of American working-class housewives describes the women’s careful “tin-can accounting”: monies for separate expenses were kept apart, in tin cans or labeled envelopes—one for the mortgage, another for utilities, for entertainment money, and the like. The wives in Bakke’s landmark study of unemployed workers in the 1930s used china pitchers to segregate different types of income earmarked for particular expenses: the rent of an extra room, for example, might serve to pay off the mortgage, whereas a child’s earnings were designated to purchase school clothes. And Jean Lave tells us that in Orange County, California, today, residents segregate their monies for special uses by keeping a variety of domestic “cash stashes”—“generally one in the billfold of each adult, children’s allowances and piggy banks, a ‘petty cash’ fund in a teapot-equivalent, a dish of change for parking meters or laundry”—or “banked stashes of money,” including Christmas club savings and accounts designated for special expenditures such as property or other taxes, vacations, or home and car insurance payments.⁶

As these concrete variations suggest, we face a serious question: how does money really work? How do people make these sorts of distinctions among monies, when, and for what? But first, why have theorists held so stubbornly to such mistaken views of money?

MARKET MONEY: A UTILITARIAN APPROACH

Monetization—the increase in the proportion of all goods and services bought and sold by means of money—has been accelerating for several centuries. Many eighteenth-century thinkers saw the monetization of the economy as compatible with or even complementary to the maintenance of a morally coherent social life.⁷ But the power of money to transform modern society captured the imagination of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social theorists. Deeply worried about an ever-expanding market relentlessly invading and desiccating all social spaces, classical social thinkers assumed that money, which Max Weber called the “most abstract and ‘impersonal’ element that exists in human life,” was spearheading the process of rationalization. It was the perverse magical wand that disenchanted modern life. Money turned the world, observed Simmel, into an “arithmetic problem.”⁸ On purely technical grounds, monetary accounting certainly promoted impersonal rational economic markets. But traditional social thinkers argued that the effects of money transcended the market: more significantly, money became the catalyst for the pervasive instrumentalism of modern social life. In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel summed up this nineteenth-century view in his observation that “the complete heartlessness of money is reflected in our social culture, which is itself determined by money.”⁹

The task of social theory was thus to explain this uncontested revolutionary power of money. Presumably, it stemmed from money’s total indifference to values. Money was perceived as the prototype of an instrumental, calculating approach, in Simmel's words, “the purest reification of means.” It was also the symbol of what Simmel identified as a major tendency of modern life—the reduction of quality to quantity, “which achieves its highest and uniquely perfect representation in money.” Only money, argued Simmel, “is free from any quality and exclusively determined by quantity.” With money, all qualitative distinctions between goods were equally convertible into an arithmetically calculable “system of numbers.”¹⁰

That “uncompromising objectivity” allowed money to function as a “technically perfect” medium of modern economic exchange. Free from subjective restrictions, indifferent to “particular interests, origins, or relations,” money’s liquidity and divisibility were infinite. The very essence of money, claimed Simmel, was its “unconditional interchangeability, the internal uniformity that makes each piece exchangeable for another.” Money thus served as the fitting neutral intermediary of a rational, impersonal market, “expressing the economic relations between objects ... in abstract quantitative terms, without itself entering into those relations.”¹¹ Simmel unequivocally dismissed noneconomic restrictions in the use of money as residual atavisms: “The inhibiting notion that certain amounts of money may be ‘stained with blood’ or be under a curse are sentimentalities that lose their significance completely with the growing indifference of money.” As money became nothing but “mere money,” its freedom was apparently unassailable and its uses unlimited.¹²

This objectification of modern life had a dual effect. On the one hand, Simmel argued that a money economy broke the personal bondage of traditional arrangements by allowing every individual the freedom of selecting the terms and partners of economic exchange. But the quantifying alchemy of money had a more ominous chemistry. In an early essay, Marx had warned that the transformational powers of money subverted reality, “confounding and compounding ... all natural and human qualities . . . [money] serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities.” As the ultimate objectifier—a “god among commodities”—money not only obliterated all subjective connections between objects and individuals, but also reduced personal relations to the “cash nexus.”¹³ Indeed, Marx argued in the Grundrisse and Capital, money fetishism was the most “glaring” form of commodity fetishism. The “perverted” process by which social relations between people were transmuted into material relations among things peaked with money. For other commodities might retain their more “natural” value or “use value” and therefore some distinctive quality. But as pure exchange value, money necessarily assumed an “unmeaning” form, which in turn neutralized all possible qualitative distinctions between commodities. In their money form, noted Marx, “all commodities look alike.” And more incongruously still, money turned even intangible objects devoid of utility—such as conscience or honor—into ordinary commodities. Thus the priceless itself surrenders to price. “Not even the bones of saints . . . are extra commercium hominum able to withstand the alchemy.”¹⁴

For Marx, money was thus an irresistible and “radical leveler,” invading all areas of social life. By homogenizing all qualitative distinctions into an abstract quantity, money allowed the “equation of the incompatible.” Half a century later, Simmel confirmed Marx’s diagnosis, dubbing money a “frightful leveler,” which perverted the uniqueness of personal and social values: “With its colorlessness and indifference . . . [money] hollows out the core of things . . . their specific value, and their incomparability.” Indeed, in his analysis of prostitution Simmel recognized “in the nature of money itself something of the essence of prostitution.” Of all social relationships, prostitution, noted Simmel, was “the most striking instance of mutual degradation to a mere means,” thereby connecting prostitution to the money economy—“the economy of ‘means’ in the strictest sense.” Max Weber, too, pointed to the fundamental antago...