Free The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman

emphasm on production, prediction, and control.
     
     
Because we ourselves live in a society so completely dominated by a money

economy, because the cash value of things has become their only value,

it is difficult for us to imagine an age not ruled by money and almost

impossible to understand the formative influence that the introduction of

a money economy exerted on the consciousness of early modern Europe. The

sudden emphasis on money and credit was the most obvious fact of economic

life during the Renaissance. The accumulation of vast sums in the hands of

single individuals, like the Medici, gave capital a magical quality, the

more so as the increasingly popular sale of indulgences brought entry into

heaven under its sway. Salvation had literally been the goal of Christian

life; now, since it could be purchased, money was. This penetration of

finance into the very core of Christianity could not help but rupture

the Thomistic synthesis. The German sociologist Georg Simmel argued that

the money economy "created the ideal of exact numerical calculation,"

and that the "mathematically exact interpretation of the cosmos" was

the "theoretical counterpart of a money economy." In a society that was

coming to regard the world as one big arithmetical problem, the notion

that there existed a sacred relationship between the individual and the

cosmos seemed increasingly dubious.7
     
     
Money's seemingly unlimited ability to reproduce itself further

substantiated the notion of an infinite universe which was so central to

the new world view. Profit, the crux of the capitalist system, is open

ended. A "capitalist economy and modern methodical science," wrote the

historian Alfred von Martin,
     
     
are the expression of an urge towards what is on principle unlimited

and without bounds; they are the expression of a dynamic will to

progress ad infinitum. Such were the inevitable consequences of

the breakup of an economically as well as intellectually closed

community. Instead of a closed economy administered in the traditional

mode and by a privileged group by way of monopoly, we now find an

open cycle and the corresponding change in consciousness.8
     
     
The emphasis on individual will which we identify with Renaissance

thought, specifically with the merchant-entrepreneurial class, also had an

obvious affinity with the new arithmetical Weltanschauung. The same class

that came to power through the new economy, that glorified the effort of

the individual, and that began to see in financial calculation a way of

comprehending the entire cosmos, came to regard quantification as the key

to personal success because quantification alone was thought to enable

mastery over nature by a rational understanding of its laws. Both money

and scientific intellect (especially in its Cartesian identification

with mathematics) have a purely formal, and thus "neutral" aspect. They

have no tangible content, but can be bent to any purpose. Ultimately,

they became the purpose. Historically, the circle was thus complete,

as Figure 8 illustrates:
     
     
     

     
     
Finally, even the notion of time -- and few things are as basic to numan

consciousness as the way in which the passage of events is perceived --

underwent a fundamental transformation. As Mircea Eliade points out in

"The Myth of the Eternal Return," the premodern conception of time is

cyclical. For the people of the Middle Ages, the seasons and events of

life followed one another with a comforting regularity. The notion of

time as linear was experientially alien to this world, and the need to

measure it correspondingly muted. But by the thirteenth century this

situation was already changing. Time, wrote Alfred von Martin,
     
     
was felt to be slipping away continuously. . . . After the thirteenth

century the clocks in the Italian cities struck all the twenty-four

hours of the day. It was realized that time was always short and

hence valuable,