Note 854 — Chapter XIII · THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY

Pilate’s question settles also the relation of economy to science. The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand, to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can only choose between adapting himself to this environment—and then he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless—and fleeing from it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond. But the same happens also—and here not without a comic side to it—in the intellectualism of the city. The philosopher who has built up an ethical-social system that is replete with virtue and (of course) the only true one, may enlighten the economic life as to how it should behave and at what it should aim. It is even the same spectacle, whether labelled liberal, anarchistic, or socialistic, or derived from Plato, Proudhon, or Marx. Here, too, economy carries on undisturbed and leaves the thinker to choose between withdrawing to pour out on paper his lamentations of this world, and entering it as an economic politician, in which case he either makes himself ridiculous, or else promptly throws his theory to the devil and starts to win himself a leading place.