Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Rudolf-Wolfgang Müller: The Idea of Money and Money as Idea

This chapter surveys the relation between money and ideation in the writings of two insightful but often overlooked German thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, namely Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Rudolf-Wolfgang Müller. Sohn-Rethel had stressed on numerous occasions that his main target of research was the generic explanation of mental abstraction, especially through the perspective of the development of modern, natural (and social) science. The chapter locates Sohn-Rethel’s philosophical program at the intersection of the post-Kantian materialism of the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century neo-Kantian emphasis on the constitution of the subject so as to develop a novel materialist account of subjectivity. An examination of the development of Sohn-Rethel’s thought leads to the notion of “real abstraction” in Intellectual and Manual Labour. The second half of the chapter introduces the works of Rudolf-Wolfgang Müller in and places his own attitudes toward money alongside the thought of Sohn-Rethel. Müller’s main opus, Money and Mind: On the Genetic History of Identity Consciousness and Rationality Since Antiquity, can be conceived as one of the greatest contributions of historical self-reflection of modernity, as it not only reconstructs the material (especially monetary) presuppositions of abstract philosophical thinking in ancient Greece but also examines critically certain basic thinkers of classical and contemporary modernity, such as David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Theodor W. Adorno, Jean Piaget, and Erik Erikson.