Abstraction and Embodiment in the Core Institutions of Capitalism: Money, Property, and Labor

This chapter presents a view, inspired by Simmel, and merging philosophy, psychology, and history, that rejects disembodied accounts of money. The contention is that money is the medium of abstraction in the market via inward embodiment of the opportunity cost principle associated with monetary prices, and a source of assetification via outward embodiment as cognitive blending of objects and money in pricing. Using the Aoki-Bourdieu model, the chapter explains the fundamental role of trust in money and its intrinsic association with power asymmetries in the market. Money is also viewed as a medium of abstraction in the institution of property, analyzed as a mode of institutional action of appropriation characterized by the alienability of objects, and different from possession, ownership, and theft. The chapter concludes with a diagnosis of assetification of human work as “labor power,” a critique of disembodied economic theories, and an embodied analysis based on Arendt’s approach to Vita activa, encompassing care, reproduction, and production in human activities.