Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/612

 596 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

desirable. Without price, therefore — price originally in this extensive sense — value does not come into being. That of two objects the one is more valuable than the other comes to pass subjectively as well as objectively only where one agent is ready to give this for that, but conversely that is not to be obtained for this. In transactions that have not become complicated the higher or lower value can be only the consequence or the expres- sion of this immediate practical will to exchange. And if we say we exchange the things for each other because they are equally valuable, it is only that frequent inversion of thought and speech by which we also say that things pleased us because they were beautiful, whereas, in reality, they are beautiful because they please us.

If, thus, value is at the same time the offspring of price, it seems to be an identical proposition that their height must be the same. I refer now to the above proof, that in each indi- vidual case no contracting party pays the price which is to him, under the given circumstances, too high for the thing obtained. If in the poem of Chamisso the highwayman at the point of the pistol compels the victim to sell him his watch and rings for three coppers, the fact is that under the circumstances, since the victim could not otherwise save his life, the thing obtained in exchange was actually worth the price. No laborer would work for starvation wages if, in the situation in which he actually found himself, he did not prefer this wage to not working. The appearance of paradox in the assertion of the equivalence of value and price in every individual case arises only from the fact that certain conceptions of other kinds of equivalence of value and price are brought into our estimate of the case. The relative stability of the relationships by which the majority of exchanges are determined ; on the other hand the analogies which fix still uncertain value-relations according to the norm of others already existing, produce the conceptions : if for a definite object this and that other definite object were exchange equivalents, these two or this group of objects would have equality in the scale of value ; and if abnormal circumstances caused us to exchange the one object for values higher or lower in the scale, price and value