Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/64

 50 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

school of Marx, Carey, and Duhring, who all of them have done justice to only one side of valuing, and some of whom overrate the side of supply and some the side of demand. Simmel's theory of value is a theory of sacrifice. But he does not char- acterize the sacrifice or the cost as value, but as the elements which form value. As long as an object comes to us without painstaking it is worthless, like water at the source and the air we breathe. Only the distance that stands between our desires and their fulfilment makes us project the intensity of our need on to the object ; only the dissolution from its merely being enjoyed makes the object an object of value. When a Volks- wirtschaft develops, it seems as if the objects determined their own value by being exchanged, while in reality the subjective satisfaction of needs is the basis for this valuation. The distance between subjects and objects, produced by difficulties of acquisi- tion, i. e., rarity, by the necessary division in different possibilities of employment, by all sorts of obstacles, only this gives value to things. But Simmel does not make the mistake of earlier economists, as he does not pretend the force of resistance to be proportional to value. Has the distance between subjects and objects once become a fact, it takes the technical form of an exchange, this being the only possibility that objects determine each other's values. The tendency toward an objectivation of values, toward a mere mechanization of economics, never comes to an end. As exchange is of importance to the whole of society, by being exchanged an object becomes an object of value. The sacrifice, the being obliged to give one thing for another, creates values. Exchange is only one out of the multitude of relations of which life consists and which manifest themselves in every love, in every friendship.

The objection that the isolated householder, who neither buys nor sells, and economic periods before the development of exchange, cannot know valuation if it is exchange which forms value, is subtly confuted by Simmel. According to him the essential characteristic of exchange consists only in the fact that a subject now possesses something which formerly it did not possess, and does not possess something which formerly it did