The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton Classics)

by Albert O. Hirschman

Here Montesquieu seems to marvel at money’s being an exception to what became known in modern economics as the law of decreasing marginal utility. About one hundred fifty years later the German sociologist Georg Simmel made some illuminating remarks on this very subject. Normally, he said, the fulfilment of human desire means an intimate acquaintance with all the diverse facets of the desired object or experience, and this acquaintance is responsible for the well-known dissonance between desire and fulfilment, which takes most frequently the form of disappointment; but the desire for any given amount of money, once satisfied, is uniquely immune to this disappointment provided that money is not spent on things, but that its accumulation becomes an end in itself: for then “as a thing absolutely devoid of quality, [money] cannot hide either surprise or disappointment as does any object, however miserable.”73 Simmel’s psychological explanation might have appealed to Hume, Montesquieu, and Dr. Johnson, who were obviously intrigued by the constancy of the love of money, so peculiar a quality in a passion.