"What we now call "finance" is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love"
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Finance, in Graves's hands, isn't just a system that went wrong; it's affection gone cold, algebra wearing the skin of intimacy. Calling it an "intellectual perversion" is a deliberately moral phrasing, not an economic one. "Perversion" suggests misdirection: a healthy impulse rerouted into something compulsive, clever, and ultimately inhuman. The barb lands because Graves treats finance less as a neutral tool than as a corrupted form of relationship.
The line hinges on his contrast between "warm human love" and the modern abstraction of value. Early exchange, gift economies, lending among neighbors: these are, at least in the cultural imagination, acts embedded in trust, reciprocity, and obligation. Graves isn't romanticizing barter so much as pointing to the psychic temperature of it. Money, at first, is a promise between people; "finance" is that promise scaled up until it no longer requires people at all, only instruments, models, and the permission structure of institutions. The warmth gets replaced by virtuoso thinking that can justify almost anything as long as the numbers balance.
As a novelist and poet shaped by the trauma and disillusionment of the early 20th century, Graves is alert to the way language and intellect can launder violence. His subtext is that modernity prides itself on rationality while quietly celebrating extraction. By framing finance as love's perversion, he flips a common defense - it's just business - into an accusation: business is a story we tell to avoid admitting what we're taking from one another.
The line hinges on his contrast between "warm human love" and the modern abstraction of value. Early exchange, gift economies, lending among neighbors: these are, at least in the cultural imagination, acts embedded in trust, reciprocity, and obligation. Graves isn't romanticizing barter so much as pointing to the psychic temperature of it. Money, at first, is a promise between people; "finance" is that promise scaled up until it no longer requires people at all, only instruments, models, and the permission structure of institutions. The warmth gets replaced by virtuoso thinking that can justify almost anything as long as the numbers balance.
As a novelist and poet shaped by the trauma and disillusionment of the early 20th century, Graves is alert to the way language and intellect can launder violence. His subtext is that modernity prides itself on rationality while quietly celebrating extraction. By framing finance as love's perversion, he flips a common defense - it's just business - into an accusation: business is a story we tell to avoid admitting what we're taking from one another.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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