Note 911 — Chapter XIII · THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE (A) MONEY

In our Culture the credit of a country rests upon its economic capacity and the political organization thereof—which imparts to the operations and bookings of finance the character of real money-creations—and not on any quantity of gold that may be put into this or that. It is the Classicist superstition that raises the gold reserve to the status of an actual measure of credit—actual in that the level of credit is thereby made dependent, not upon “will,” but upon “can.” But the current coins are wares, which, relatively to national credit, possess a price—the poorer the credit, the higher the price of gold—so that thenceforth it can only be upheld against that of other wares. Thus gold is measured like other wares against the unit of book-reckoning, and not vice versa as the term “gold standard” suggests. It serves also as means of payment in minor transactions, as for that matter a postage-stamp does. In old Egypt (whose money-thought is astoundingly like the Western) there was nothing resembling the coin even under the New Empire. The written transfer was entirely sufficient, and the Classical coins that filtered in from 650 to the founding of Alexandria and the Hellenistic régime were usually cut to pieces and reckoned by weight as a ware.