︎ Money and the “Metrization” of the World: On the Co-Evolution of Money, Writing, and Cognition

Jan 12, 2022

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This talk deals with the genesis of money in ancient Mesopotamia (money as an abstract unit of account, a bookkeeping device) as well as in ancient Greece (money as coin). The focus is on the gradual “metrization” of the world and the development of forms of cognition that accompany the appearence of these respective forms of money. The example of Mesopotamia shows the co-evolution of money as a tool for measurement and cuneiform writing as well as the world’s first systems to measure space and time. For ancient Greece, the parallel development of money as coin, of the vocal alphabet, of pre- Socratic philosophy, and of the polis will be discussed. Following the classical approaches of Oswald Spengler (deep uniformities) and Alfred Sohn-Rethel (real-abstraction) as well as contemporary accounts by Arno Bammé and Davor Löffler (civilizational capacities), core aspects of a materialistic theory of socio-cultural evolution will be outlined.

(Hanno Pahl)