Footnote 4, Chapter 8, of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 193, 200. Marc Shell uses the phrase "money of the mind" in a fascinating study of the origins of the money system in ancient Greece (The Economy of Literature [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978]). According to Shell, the money economy developed along with a new form of symbolic thinking. Like symbols (and like the bureaucracy surrounding or hiding the ruler), money is the manifestation of something kept hidden; for Plato, the logic of the Sophists, with their manipulation of the relationship between words and meanings, is a "money of the mind," analogous to the shifting relationship between currency and goods. This is Marx's complaint, and that of Ruskin as well, who as we will see develops a theory of language to counteract his opponents' "money of the mind." (Shell's discussion of the Greeks is actually of greater help in understanding Ruskin than his essay on Unto This Last in the same book.) For Ruskin's relations to Marxian man, see Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 137, although Hewison retracts his view in "Notes on the Construction of The Stones of Venice," in Studies in Ruskin, ed. Robert Rhodes and Del Ivan Janik (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982).
Last modified December 2000