Psychology of Language: A Local Habitation and a Name Book

This is an interesting book. Faint praise, perhaps, but it really is interesting, in that it forced me to write down a bunch of notes on an index card and purchase my own copy (this one's from the library) for reference at a later date.

If you haven’t already read the synopsis, Buchan’s book is a sort of narrative history of money, both as a concept and an object. That’s not really a good description, to be fair, but it’s the best I can do right now. By taking us through episodes in money’s history, he examines some of the modern notions about money and how they intersect with how money has worked in the past. In many ways, this becomes a list of curious facts about money’s history. A “did you know…” compendium that is told via historical narrative.

This is not, to be clear, a book about “economics,” so anyone looking for equations or explanations of phenomena should seek her fortune elsewhere. There are no theories and no proposals – it really is a more “personal” history of an impersonal subject. Memoirs of a Dollar. In this way, Buchan seems to attempt to make a larger point about what money is by telling its story, with some asides and (somewhat literary) analysis, throughout human history.

This is where the book is not as successful – at the macro-level. The whole never quite surpasses the sum of the parts, and the book remains a collection of thought-provoking facts about the history of money. There is also a problem with some of Buchan’s analysis – though he largely rejects Marx’s views, his own conception of how money exists in society isn’t so terribly different from the “money” chapter of Capital.

But for the most part, though it lacks a certain coherence as a book, it’s an engaging read. The prose can be a little gummy as Buchan lets his breeding get the best of him now and then, but he’s good with a turn of phrase, and made me laugh out loud a few times.