“Montesquieu describes here first how commerce was hampered by the prohibition of interest-taking by the church and was consequently taken up by the Jews; how the Jews suffered violence and constant extortions at the hands of nobles and kings; and how eventually they reacted by inventing the bill of exchange (lettre de change). The final portion of the chapter draws striking conclusions: ‘…and through this means commerce could elude violence, and maintain itself everywhere; for the richest trader had only invisible wealth which could be sent everywhere without leaving any trace. … In this manner we owe … to the avarice of rulers the establishment of a contrivance which somehow lifts commerce right out of their grip’” (Hirschman 1977, p. 72).
The transition from political to private property, i.e. the emergence of bills of exchange and the development of sovereign debt, led to monetary transactions as a special type of commodity transactions in which it is not goods that are traded, but money itself. The payment for money is interest.
“… Money as a whole takes on a very distinctive character in specific monetary transactions; that is, when it does not function as a medium of exchange to other objects, but as the central content, as the object of a transaction sufficient to itself. Money is an end in itself in the purely bilateral financial operation not only in the sense that it has suspended its qualities as a means, but also in the sense that it is, from the outset, the self-sufficient center of interest, which also develops its own distinctive norms and, at the same time, completely autonomous qualities and a corresponding technique” (Simmel 2004, p. 309).
Debt and interest commercialized traditional society. As more mercenaries were hired, the concept of wage activity spread. As products became commodities, consumers depended more on the market and monetary income than on subsistence production. As private property took hold, there was less room for communities or communal forms of possession. Robert Lane distinguished between warm and cold societies. He called societies based on emotional support, empathy and reciprocity “warm”, and societies based on impersonal relationships and money “cold”:
“From Marx and Engels’s statement that ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, then callous cash-payment,’ to Tönnies’ ‘in Gesellschaft every person strives for that which is to his own advantage and affirms the action of others only in so far as and as long as they can further his interest,’ to Weber’s alleged movement from the communal relationship ‘based on the subjective feelings of parties… that they belong together,’ to the more impersonal interest-based associative relationship, to Sebastian de Grazia’s view that the contemporary commercial ‘competitive directive’ requires us to reduce all affective relationships, to Fromm who argues that capitalism at least, and perhaps all modernity, leads us to treat each other as machines—we find in all these sources and their many epigones expressed the idea of the modern cold society” (Lane 1978, p. 453).
A warm society is based on a material community: unity of place and time of life, joint action and joint possession of the basic conditions of life—a forest, a river, a field. Warm societies are those of personal communication, passion, repute and rumors. A cold society is based on an
