Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism.

• Author: Kuznicki, Jason

Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism

Alan S. Kahan

New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Press, 2010, 309. pp.

Alan Kahan's Mind vs. Money is an absurdly ambitious little book. I had all sorts of disagreements with it, both factually and methodologically. Still, it does important work, and does so well enough that I would not hesitate to teach from it as a textbook in the intellectual history of commerce.

Kahan presents a sweeping, yet surprisingly brief, overview of Western intellectuals' attempts to make sense of money, commerce, and capitalism. Most of the intellectuals in his narrative seem embarrassingly ill-equipped to understand the thing with which they are confronted. One often feels sorry for their little tribe.

This is definitely the case when we watch Aristotle struggle to find a boundary between the sort of wealth that contributes to happiness and the wealth that becomes an end in itself and a detour from the Good. What, 'after all, would he think of us? Even the poorest American is wealthy in many ways that Aristotle could never imagine. Are we 'all slaves to money, and permanently detoured from the Good? Does virtue require being poorer than the ancient merchants whom Aristotle mistrusted?

One feels sympathy likewise as we watch the plight of European thinkers in the shadow of Stalin--attempting more and more desperately to prop up their devotion to the Soviet system, even as that system repeatedly embarrasses and takes advantage of them. The whole way, we feel we're in the company of some very smart people who are nonetheless terribly out of their depth.

The centuries between Aristotle and the 20th century give an idea of the ambition of Mind vs. Money. It is an ambition no book this short should ever be 'allowed to have. Consider the narrative: Ancient thinkers, either independently wealthy or otherwise unconcerned with wealth, attempt to describe all of society. Their attempts give short shrift to commerce, whose fundamentals seem like a sort of perverse magic to them. They make virtually no headway, but they bequeath to us the first of what Kalaan calls the Three Don'ts. In this case, it is "Don't make money (just have it)."

Medieval thinkers were brought up in the Christian tradition, which valorizes poverty and charity, but certainly not commerce. They gave us Kahan's second Don't: "Don't have money (just give it to the poor)."

The Renaissance is no renaissance for thinking about money and commerce...