230 THE SOCIAL THEORY OF GEORG SIMMEL

equivalent in money received. But the money economy
has also permitted the growth of the free professions and
made possible the functioning of civil servants. For these
individuals there is no immediate relation between a specific
 task or a specific service and the money received. The
payment and the salaries of these classes are directed rather
 toward giving the individual as a whole a sufficiently
high standard of living to enable him to fulfil his functions.
In this case the function has also differentiated from the
personality, although not so completely, and the maintenance
 of the individual becomes part of the economic
world, while the single service or function does not find its
immediate and specific equivalent in money.
But, in the last analysis, this differentiation between
the person and the object or function is still a differentiation
 within the latter. The money economy merely gives
the different spheres of interest and activity of the individual
 a relative independence of each other. If money
lifts the economic function out of the totality of the personality,
 it remains none the less an activity of the individual.
 The opposite of the economic activity is merely the
totality of the personality minus the economic function.
What money does is to atomize the mental life of the individual,
 to individualize the different spheres within the
individual. This is merely a continuation of the process of
individualization and the growth of individual liberty
within the group. The money economy has given the individual
 a relative independence of the immediate interests
 of his group, a relative self-sufficiency which finds
expression in the pronounced individualism that accompanies
 all money economy and that was as characteristic
of imperial Rome and of Florence as it is of the present-day
Western world.
But money does not only lead to a liberation of the in-