TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
67
undergo a decisive change: they become entities of exchange and
the bearer of their "value" is society and not man, who produces
and uses and judges. The "good" loses its character as an idea, the
standard by which the good and the bad can be measured and recog–
nized; it has become a value which can be exchanged with other
values, such as those of expediency or of power. The holder of values
can refuse this exchange and become an "idealist," who prices the
value of "good" higher than the value of expediency; but this does
not make the "value" of good any less relative.
The term "value" owes its origin to the sociological trend which
even before Marx was quite manifest in the relatively new science
of classical economy. Marx was still aware of the fact, which the
social sciences have since forgotten, that nobody "seen in his isola–
tion produces values," but that products "become values only in their
social relationship." His distinction between "use value" and "ex–
change value" reflects the distinction between things as men use and
produce them and their value in society, and his insistence on the
greater authenticity of use values, his frequent description of the rise
of exchange value as a kind of original sin at the beginning of
market production, reflect his own helpless and, as it were, blind re–
cognition of the inevitability of an impending "devaluation of all
values." The birth of the social sciences can be located at the mo–
ment when all things, "ideas" as well as material objects, were equated
with values so that everything derived its existence from and was re–
lated to society, the
bonum
and
malum
no less than tangible objects.
In the dispute as to whether capital or labor is the source of values,
it is generally overlooked that at no time prior to the incipient Indus–
trial Revolution was it held that values, and not things, are the result
of man's productive capacity, or everything that exists related to so–
ciety and not to man "seen in his isolation." The notion of "socialized
men," whose emergence Marx projected
into
the future classless so–
ciety, is in fact the underlying assumption of classical as well as
Marxian economy.
It
is therefore only natural that the perplexing question which
has plagued all later "value-philosophies," where to find the one
supreme value by which to measure all others, should first appear
in
the economic sciences which,
in
Marx's words, try to "square the
circle- to find a commodity of unchanging value which would serve
