In this fascinating and always stimulating book, S. Herbert Frankel contrasts two philosophies of money both of which have profound implications for how people view the relationship of the individual to government and society. The first view, best represented in the writings of Georg Simmel, the nineteenth century sociologist, is that money is an example of spontaneous order in society, an institution that developed organically with society itself, affecting and in turn being affected by it. As Simmel described it, money is a 'functional category of modem civilization: the symbol of its spirit, forms and thought' which nevertheless cannot be divorced from the concrete relationships it symbolizes. The second view, exemplified in the twentieth century by lohn Maynard Keynes, is that money is something apart from society, a creation of the state whose value rests on the authority of the state and which is useful primarily as a tool of state policy.