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James Buchan

Frozen Desire: Meaning of Money Paperback – October 24, 2001

by James Buchan (Author)

4.2 24 ratings

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The best single book I have ever seen on the history, sociology, literature, cultures, and philosophy of money.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Welcome Rain Publishers
Publication date

October 24, 2001
Dimensions

5.54 x 0.73 x 8.24 inches
ISBN-10

1566491800
ISBN-13

978-1566491808
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Welcome Rain Publishers (October 24, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1566491800
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1566491808
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.54 x 0.73 x 8.24 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,888,931 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,021 in Philosophy History & Survey
- #149,262 in Social Sciences (Books)

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4.2 24 ratings

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Philo

A work of brilliance, sheer joy to read, line by line, for the right audience

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 30, 2017

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First, a quick sample, and not the most graceful passage, rather clunky and businesslike, but showing the nuggets to be found, rooting here, which are everywhere, page after page: here is the best compact description of modern big banks and our times (2008 and all), capturing in an almost offhand sweep of the author's pen the roots going back 150 years to England (mind you, in a 1997 book):

"... Parliament [in 1879] reformed the [banking-corporate] law, permitting limited liability to banking companies other than the Bank of England: that had the perverse effect of making banks even more irresponsible and, now that their deposits are de jure or de facto guaranteed by the state, they have become, with a handful of exceptions, institutional imbeciles that loses their capital once in every cycle of cheap and dear money. ..." (Pg. 209.)

I take extended walks, often on trails, gazing off to various horizons, imbibing books. (It is usually audio on trails, sometimes running plus listening, but I can read print books and hike). Point being, I love all kinds of odd and challenging stimuli: the outdoors, bodily challenges, challenges to the thinking and reflecting mind, often all at once.. This book is a perfect companion for that approach, even if read in bed or bathtub! Think of an author with a sheer gift for words, wrapping money concepts in and around all sorts of well-illuminated historical scenes, traipsing across wonderful and often wicked portraits of characters, and great snippets of their best ideas. Here are kings, prostitutes, poets, con-artists. Here are minds and events as I've never seen them, different takes on Adam Smith, Karl Marx, tulip mania (to cite more familiar ones), on and on, page after page, and piercing quotes from many brilliant souls unheard of. It all parades from back in the recesses of time, all the while holding up the ideas of money and its uses (and interfaces with all aspects of ourselves) to every light and angle. Societies rise up in money-addled ecstasy and crash on the reefs of the same. The language and thinking are colorful and made with a joyous wink. Lyrical, virtuoso, funny, made with a flourish. This is my grail, this I seek in my self-education in recent years. This surpasses in depth, intensity and richness all my past in law school, etc. This time around, I do it for joy, in this sort of wide, looping style of indirection, wanderings, sure I will find critical insights along this path. And I do find them: this is the liberation of the intellectual from a thousand little traps set in this biological soup of manipulation and purposeful distractions we call "society". This book liberates me, and not a little, and spoils me every inch of the way with its nimbleness of language and thought, its new angles on things I thought I knew, things I have read multiple books on! I daresay it is my all-time favorite book, ever (though I say this a few times every year). As I tell students, if you only take at face value the slick and shiny surfaces nowadays tossed up right in your face,,dancing with superficiality and distraction by design, you will not reach the heights of the smart money, or the even greater depths of a real philosopher, here paraded so brilliantly. Here I get new insights on every single page, and often two or three. And in this, it dances all the way. For personal use, I'm going to read this, record a copy to listen to, maybe once a year. It's that good, with this praise coming from a guy who reads 2-3 books per week.
A person without a fair background in European history, ideas and letters (a great start: Clark's 'Civilisation' in print), and nimble reading skills, and a sheer love of words, might flounder here, and see this as needlessly complex gobbledegook. With all respect, I'm sorry for you. Your joys lie elsewhere. This book liberates me from my own ignorance every time I pick it up. ,

4 people found this helpful

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Mark K. Jensen

Demanding but rewarding

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 28, 2009

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This is a very unusual and original work that the author acknowledges to be "amateur and impressionistic" (11). Its manner is highly personal. Buchan challenges the reader with opaque, cryptic, sometimes hyperbolic modes of expression. An erudite man, he assumes his reader is well grounded in history and literature.

Buchan's thinking is often difficult to follow and is expressed in a manner designed to force the reader to slow down and reflect. This is a book for pondering and rereading. As he anticipated (268), professional readers have tended to dismiss it. One wrote: "'Frozen Desire' [shows] and the ticks and twitches of too much research, too many lost hours amongst the library stacks, show on almost every page. Unsure why it started, the book upends itself by closing with . . . hopeless, romantic idealism." But ecologist Peter Warshall of Whole Earth Catalog, who holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology from Harvard, called Buchan "the only nonfiction writer willing to trek into this dangerous world . . . His breadth is huge, from Homer to Rembrandt to liability/asset management to John Law. And quixotic. . . . An accomplished writer with a roller-coaster style that loops you back to read the best paragraphs two or three times."

Buchan hoped 'Frozen Desire' would "survive for a while as a sort of by-way of the study of money, like an alley one enters to escape the blinding, crowded street" (268), and there are many signs that this has come to pass.

4 people found this helpful

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Tony D

Worth the Money

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 4, 2010

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I stumbled across this book whilst reading a compilation of book reviews by Frank Kermode (itself well worth reading). It sounded interesting and had clearly been found to be both informative and enjoyable by someone widely regarded as one of the foremost literary critics of the last few decades.
Frozen desire is an interesting mix of historical information, monetary theory, literary allusion and personal opinion. It contains accounts of the early origins of money and a consideration of what money really is (beyond the dollars and cents). There are generally understandable (to the non specialist such as this reader) accounts of key developments such as double entry book keeping and the development of the concept of credit. But it is much more than a finance manual containing as it does biographical backgrounds for key figures, such as John Law (unknown to me), Karl Marx and many others. There is an interesting chapter on the author's forebears and their involvement with the financial world. And, as mentioned, it is full of literary allusions from classical Greece through to the 20th century. It does become somewhat polemical towards the end with the authors anticipation (and apparent hope) that the time is coming when money will be displaced from its current place as the modern world's surrogate divinity.

2 people found this helpful

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MJG

Thought provoking insights into the history and cultural impact of money

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 21, 2021

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Excellent writing. Provocative insights. Readers will find themselves asking, “Once money becomes the abstract replacement for specific desired things to facilitate exchanges (chickens, cabbages, apples) what hasn’t been reduced to a money equivalent in our society?” Family? Think Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Fourth of July. Religion? Think collection plate, foreign missions, elegant churches, mosques, and temples. The economy? Think GDP, employment, homelessness, low-income housing, climate change policy. Hence, the metaphor, “frozen desire.” Hence the disruptive value of reading this book.

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jonone100

A truly unique and brilliant work that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of money

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 11, 2013

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Previous reviewers have had trouble catagorising this 1997 book. The loose consensus seems to be around it being a history of money. I think though, its better described as a biography of money, or perhaps money's memoirs.

Broadly speaking, the book does proceed chronologically, but it focuses in on money's most memorable moments; the birth of coinage in Lydia, Judas's betrayal of Christ for thirty pieces of silver, Columbus and the Gold of the Americas, John Law (the best portrait of the man I've read), etc. All the while Buchan draws on a quite staggering knowledge of literature and history to create a rich narrative for money which he grounds in a few carefully chosen vignettes detailing some of his own experience with money.

In terms of other writing about money it sits somewhere between Marc Shell and Glyn Davies (admittedly a big space). Although it's not an academic work per se, it lacks none of the rigor or detail of academia but the writing is less economical. Indeed, it can be a little too flowery for my taste at times. Also, Buchan has the habit - which tended to grate with me - of splitting up sentences with hyphens, making the reading of the book harder than it needed to be.

However, these are minor points against what is a truly unique and brilliant work. I'd give it six stars if I could. Whilst I'm not convinced by Buchan's central thesis, that money is frozen desire, I am deeply impressed by his knowledge, I was enthralled by the telling of money's story, and believe this book to be a significant contribution to our understanding of money.