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use might bring.

Perhaps, though, all this talk about money in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is only prominent because of a sense of economic crisis. As John Lanchester points out in his How to Speak Money (2015), while the economy is calm, there is less need to understand economics. However, Money Talk has, in fact, a very long history – and that, in itself, is a sociological puzzle. A serious account of that history is well beyond the scope of this book – and may be a foolish enterprise in any case (but see Jackson, 1995; Buchan, 1997; and for shorter accounts, Martin, 2014: ch. 10; Plender, 2015: ch. 1). But even a casual sampling of the literature of past periods shows a remarkable similarity in the way that Money Talk is mobilized across the centuries. The Bible, of course, is a rich, if inconsistent, source of Money Talk which has informed the writing of subsequent centuries. Some sixteen of the forty parables of Jesus concern money. The Gospels and the Epistles more generally are similarly full of familiar comment on the destructive power of riches, such as: ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19:24) or ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon’ (Luke 16:13) or ‘Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you’ (James 5:1). The Graeco-Roman world played a similarly significant role in forming the views on money of future generations. The story of King Midas has provided a cautionary tale for centuries. Aristotle’s opinions on usury were influential in medieval Christian doctrine. He condemned usury as ‘hated’ and a practice ‘which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it’ since ‘money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest’ (quoted in Jackson, 1995: 244). Similarly, prohibitions on the practice of usury occur throughout the Koran and the restriction is still widespread in Islamic countries. As it declares, ‘whoever returneth to usury, they shall be the companions of hell fire, they shall continue therein for ever’ (quoted in Jackson, 1995: 248). Shakespeare takes up the theme of usury in his The Merchant of Venice, while dealing with another vice of money in Timon of Athens (act 4, scene 3, later used by Karl Marx in Capital). In the latter play, gold:

      This yellow slave

      Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;

      Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

      And give them title, knee and approbation

      With senators on the bench.

In some ways it is perverse to pick out individual plays in Shakespeare since all of them use metaphors involving money. Coins, for example, are omnipresent. As one commentator notes: ‘The way coinage was treated in early modern England created an assemblage of variously useful shorthand symbols and similes, providing a way of concisely expressing aspects of the human condition’ (Cook, 2012: 71). Timon of Athens was probably written in the early years of the seventeenth century. Almost a century earlier, Thomas More had published his Utopia. With a characteristic combination of certainty and violence of expression, he pronounces on the evils of money which would be remedied by its abolition: ‘For who can fail to see that fraud, theft, pillaging, disputes, riots, strife, rebellion, murder, treason, poisoning … would die out with the abolition of money. And at the very moment when money vanished, so too would fear, anxiety, grief, stress and wakeful nights’ (More, 2012: 120, 121).

      The eighteenth-century Adam Smith is often thought of as the godfather of the doctrine of unregulated markets. He, however, also identified the vice of money as riches: ‘With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which, in their eye, is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves’ (Smith, 1999: 277). At much the same time as the publication of The Wealth of Nations, the English Romantic movement was stressing, not so much the perils of riches, as the corruption of fundamental human values that money engenders. Shelley (1929: Queen Mab, section V, lines 44–5), for example, notes:

      Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade

      No solitary virtue dares to spring

      while, more famously, Wordsworth (1936: sonnet XXXIII) asserts:

      The world is too much with us; late and soon,

      Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

      Little we see in Nature that is ours;

      We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

      In Marx’s earlier work, the idea that money corrupts value is especially prominent. In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in the midst of his discussion of Timon of Athens, he says: ‘If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?’ (Marx, 1964: 167, emphasis in original). And, at much the same time, Charles Dickens was writing his novels, in almost all of which the vices of money take a prominent place. He has Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit declare: ‘I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to anyone belonging to it’ (Dickens, 1953: 49). Summarizing, the critic Humphrey House notes: ‘Money is the main theme of nearly every book that Dickens wrote: getting, keeping, spending, owing, bequeathing, provide the intricacies of his plots; character after character is constructed round an attitude to money’ (House, 1942: 58; see also Miller, 1967; Trilling, 1967).

Despite its continuity and longevity, however, Money Talk does not, over its long history, make the same claims. It is used, typically to attach blame, condemnation and disgust. At the same time, money, it seems, can perform almost any function and encourage any sin. According to writers over many centuries, money promotes, among other things: greed, miserliness, display, contempt for the poor, the defilement of honour and a good name, perversion of the sacred, the destruction of more important human virtues, calculation and measurement, a worship of the transitory and unreal, the obliteration of uniqueness, a tendency to abstraction, the erosion of authenticity, a false standard of excellence, the diminution of the quality of personal relationships and the encouragement of debt and corruption in public life.

      These qualities of Money Talk – its diversity and its moral and rhetorical force – indicate that it is a portmanteau expression. Money comes to stand for, or index, a whole variety of other matters that are not necessarily connected with each other or, indeed, with money. Money Talk then becomes a general way of expressing discontent with, or outright opposition to, current social arrangements. The diversities of meaning do not indicate intellectual carelessness. Rather, they give to Money Talk a flexibility that enables it to adapt to changing circumstances. Furthermore, Money Talk is rooted in the mundane. As I have already noted above, it is part of everyday conversation, a set of basic assumptions which are often unconsciously made. In addition, it refers to an entity – money – that is in some respects mysterious and hidden. Dickens captures the point somewhat lyrically:

      The mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. (quoted in Miller, 1967: 170)

      In short, Money Talk is ideological.

Ideologies are rarely subtle and Money Talk is no exception. Typically, it is strident, simple, evangelical even. It does not admit of shades of gey, but only black and white. Money Talk does not inhabit a complex moral universe. It sees itself as part of a struggle with a world corrupted by money. This Manichaean quality is, in turn, a feature of another and crucial characteristic. Money Talk is usually oppositional. It constructs an enemy.

      Money Talk may be contrasted with another ideology that I shall call Coined Liberty. The phrase comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, in which the possession of money

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