At the cost of not obtaining things and of renouncing all the specific satisfactions that are tied to particulars, money can provide a sense of power far enough removed from actual empirical objects that it is not subject to the limitations imposed by possession of them. Money alone do we own completely and without limitations. It alone can be completely incorporated into the use which we plan for it.

DEFINE: Explains how money's abstractness frees it from the limits of empirical possession, a key concept in the economics-of-identity framework.

XREF: Connects to Simmel's philosophy of money — the abstraction of value from concrete objects parallels his broader thesis on the psychological consequences of the money economy.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 449