Introduction: Culture, Capital and Representation

Abstract

J. Z. Muller in his survey of capitalism’s development (The Mind and the Market, 2003) notes that there has long been a perception, owed in its origins to classical Greek conceptions of the well-governed polis, and in medieval Christianity’s notion of the moral ambiguity of wealth, that ‘profits from trade were regarded as morally illegitimate’, and that ‘making money from money’ (2003: 5) was considered in an even harsher moral light than trade itself. One need only look to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (c.1596) for an accurate representation of the relationship between those who practised ‘usury’, those who benefited from it, and those who made a virtue of despising it. Of course Shakespeare was particularly attuned to the race and gender prerogatives associated with usury, and no doubt drew upon a long-established idea of value in relation to notions of property and person, in which one could become the other in the exchange of worth. Money, therefore, has long been regarded as a base, but nevertheless real definition of worth, antithetical to the ways in which the practice of virtues (located as these are within an altogether more abstracted system of values, in the form of faith or religion) could result in the storing-up of heavenly wealth and favour. In turn that idea would find its corruption in the relationship between worldly goods, good works and their relative value in the form of the indulgences money could buy in the late fifteenth century (most infamously by Johannes Tetzel in 1517). Thus the relationship between money and value is both changeable and always ambiguous.