The Philosophy of Money

A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory for Why the World Feels So Weird

Plain English with Derek Thompson, 14 July 2026. The book comes up at 43 min 24 sec in.

Agnes Callard describes Simmel's The Philosophy of Money as an enormous work (~6,000 pages) that defines money—many times over—as "abstraction in the space of value." She uses Simmel's account of a historical movement toward increasingly abstract valuation to push back on Derek Thompson's market-language framing of the unicontext, arguing that abstraction, not markets, is the deeper concept.

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