Mkz’s Reviews > The Worldly Philosophers > Status Update

... “making a living” had not yet come into being. Economic life and social life were one and the same thing. Work was not yet a means to an end—the end being money and the things it buys. Work was an end in itself, encompassing, of course, money and commodities, but engaged in as a part of a tradition, as a natural way of life. In a word, the great social invention of “the market” had not yet been made.

The absence of the idea of gain as a normal guide for daily life—in fact the positive disrepute in which the idea was held by the Church—constituted one enormous difference between the strange world of the tenth to sixteenth centuries and the world that began, a century or two before Adam Smith, to resemble our own. But there was an even more fundamental difference. The idea of ...