If freedom means that the will may be realized unhampered, then we seem to be freer the more we own, since we have accepted as the meaning of property that we ‘can do whatever we want’ with its content. We do not have ‘freedom’ to do so with other people’s property or with objects which cannot be possessed at all.
Georg Simmel, this passage translated by David Frisby, The Philosophy of Money (1978), § ““Freedom as the articulation of the self in the medium of things” from the chapter “Synthetic Part: Individual Freedom.”
Categories
Georg Simmel
