Introduction to Late Modernity

This “Introduction” provides the context to make sense of the major themes which emerge across the nine chapters in the section on “Late Modernity”. If there has been a rupture in both the logic and in the history of money, it has been with the advent of capitalism, or more specifically, with the turn of non- and pre-capitalist money to capitalist money. In this sense capitalism equals the beginning of modern money and arguably of modernity itself. If so, modernity is a monetary phenomenon. Capitalist money and capitalist society mark not only the beginning of a new philosophical reflection on money, but also a new beginning of philosophy itself. That is, philosophy became new as capitalist society required new modes of thinking and new concepts in order to understand itself—new concepts of rationality, totality and mediation, system and process, and, of course, of society itself. Thus, the relation of philosophy and money can be seen to run in either direction: either as the philosophical reflection on money or, the other way round, capitalist money is reflected in new forms and concepts of philosophy.