“The centrepiece of Simmel’s work is a conceptualisation of exchange, an act between two people that produces value, a ‘third term, an ideal concept which enters into the duality but is not exhausted by it’. This irreducibility is why value can, in the form of money, take on a life of its own, which Simmel describes as ‘the reification of exchange among people, the embodiment of pure function’. Of course, no one said exchange would always be fair: as bandits and medical insurance companies know, one will pay any price to live. Nevertheless, as acts of exchange proliferate, currencies and prices rationalise and standardise value.”