Community and money: An Approach from Moral Sociology

Abstract

In the 19th century, sociologists presented money in opposition to community bonds. In the classic text by Ferdinand Tönnies Community and Society- from 1887, money plays a key role in the connections among society in contrast to those based on the affect and morals of the community. At the time, this narrative showed how social life relies on money in a dynamic that unraveled traditional ties and replaced others such as impersonality, abstraction, rationality and neutrality. Karl Marx and Georg Simmel made important contributions to this narrative, analyzing a type of money that was disengaged from affect or moral ties. During most of the 20th century, sociology maintained this distinction. However, starting in the 1990s, a new generation of sociologists began to reconsider this interpretation, forging a new agenda for sociology, one that focused on the morality and affect inherent to money exchanges.Today I hope to show how my own work contributes to this new sociological narrative of money. I would like to tell you how the core ideas of the perspective known as the moral sociology of money reveal sociologys ability to reconnect money with community bonds.