In his book The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, explains changes brought about by the money economy to traditional Western society at the turn of the twentieth century.

First, the more advanced a money system is, the wider is the range of objects potentially available to be quantified by money. Since many more objects are available to monetary acquisition in a money economy than in a traditional barter economy, and since the value of an object for the desiring subject largely originates from its resistance to his desire, the resistance encountered by human desires in modern society inheres more in the quantity of money one may acquire than in the qualities of objects. As the ultimate resistance to the desiring subject, money has gradually been transformed from a means to the ultimate value. Simmel – with a tinge of blasphemy – compares the value of money in an industrial society to that of God, “as the absolute means and thus as the unifying point of innumerable sequences of purposes.”

Second, Simmel believes that the money economy creates a degree of independence for an individual in his relationship with the rest of society, since as the abstract measurement of an increasingly divided laboring force, money has transformed a great number of interpersonal relationships, often based on mutual dependence in a barter economy, into various impersonal functions. “The modern division of labor permits the number of dependencies to increase just as it causes personalities to disappear behind their functions, because only one side of them operates, at the expense of all those others whose composition would make up a personality.”