for gold and coin are goods too, whose rarity and indestructibility causes them to be highly prized.[1]
Into the rhythm and course of this barter the dealer only comes as an intervener.[2] In the market the acquisitive and the creative economics encounter one another, but even at places where fleets and caravans unload, trade only appears as the organ of countryside traffic.[3] It is the "eternal" form of economy, and is even to-day seen in the immemorially ancient figure of the pedlar of the country districts remote from towns, and in out-of-the-way suburban lanes where small barter-circles form naturally, and in the private economy of savants, officials, and in general everyone not actively part of the daily economic life of the great city.
With the soul of the town a quite other kind of life awakens.[4] As soon as the market has become the town, it is not longer a question of mere centres for goods-streams traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life "out there" is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. The decisive point is this — the true urban man is not a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life-upkeep.
With this goods become wares, exchange turnover, and in place of thinking in goods we have thinking in money.
With this a purely extensional something, a form of limit-defining, is abstracted from the visible objects of economics just as mathematical thought abstracts something from the mechanistically conceived environment. Abstract
- ↑ Neither the copper pieces of the Italian Villanova-graves of early Homeric times (Willers Gesch. d. röm. Kupferprägung, p. 18) nor the early Chinese bronze coins in the form of women's drapery (pu), bells, rings, or knives (tsien, Conrady, China, p. 504) are described as money, but quite distinctly symbols of goods. And the coins struck by the governments of early Gothic times (in imitation of the Classical) as signs of sovereignty figured in economic life only as wares; a piece of gold is worth as much as a cow, but not vice versa.
- ↑ Hence it is that so often he is not an outcome of the fixed and self-contained life of the countryside, but an alien appearing in it, an alien having neither importance nor antecedents. This is the rôle of the Phœnicians in the earliest period of the Classical; of the Romans in the East in Mithradates's time; of the Jews, and with them Byzantines, Persians, and Armenians, in the Gothic West; of the Arabs in the Sudan; of the Indians in East Africa; and of the West-Europeans in present-day Russia.
- ↑ And, consequently, on a very small scale. As foreign trade was in those days highly adventurous and appealed to the imagination, it was as a rule immensely exaggerated. The "great" merchants of Venice and the Hansa about 1300 were hardly the equals of the more distinguished craftsmen. The turnover of even the Medici or the Fugger about 1400 was equivalent to that of a shop-business in a small town to-day. The largest merchant vessels, in which usually several traders held part shares, were much smaller than modern German river-barges, and made only one considerable voyage each year. The celebrated wool-export of England, a main element of Hanseatic trade, amounted about 1270 to hardly as much as the contents of two modern goods-trains (Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, (I, pp. 280, et seq.).
- ↑ P. 91.
