New Criticals


Perfect money would exist in a perfect society. Simmel makes a distinction between ethical perfection (a perfect society) and conceptual perfection (a perfect society). The former arises by a steadfast treatment of all subjects without difference – it eradicates variation via absolute equality. The latter is founded on dissimilarity – it is relative and based on difference, mobilizing the lived reality of society as heterogeneous (which, in many respects, it is). As a result, Simmel advocates for something called unequal pricing, which would be a system of pricing that would take into account “the overall state of the economy, the many-sided forces of supply and demand, [and] the fluctuating productivity of people and objects.” Unequal pricing is attentive to the “capacity of consumers to pay,” working dynamically to have the price reflect “not simply the conditions of production but the (unique) circumstances of each individual consumer.”