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 spe- 
cific task or a specific service and the money received. The 
payment and the salaries of these classes are directed rath- 
er 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 mainte- 
nance 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 differentia- 
tion within the latter. The money economy merely gives 
the different spheres of interest and activity of the indi- 
vidual a relative independence of each other. If money 
lifts the economic function out of the totality of the per- 
sonality, it remains none the less an activity of the indi- 
vidual. 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 indi- 
vidual, 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 in- 
dividual a relative independence of the immediate inter- 
ests of his group, a relative self-sufficiency which finds 
expression in the pronounced individualism that accom- 
panies 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-