Money and class
Wealth, poverty and the distances between them.
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Aristotle thought money-making had a natural limit and that lending at interest was against nature; the medieval church agreed and Dante put the usurers in hell. Plato’s Republic abolished private property for the guardians because property divides a city into two, the rich and the poor, at war with each other. That diagnosis has never been improved on, only argued with.
The moderns took the other view. Locke made property the reason for government. Adam Smith showed how a society of people pursuing their own gain could produce a wealth no one planned, and the Wealth of Nations is the founding book of economics. Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, written a generation earlier, says that the first man who fenced a field and said this is mine was the founder of civil society and of every crime that followed. Marx read them both and wrote the reply.
The novel is where the theme lives. Austen’s marriages are transactions and she never pretends otherwise. Dickens’s Little Dorrit is set in a debtors’ prison. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is a whole town organised by money. Tocqueville saw that equality of condition would change everything and Veblen, at the end of the shelf, explained what the rich buy and why.
