Edward Skidelsky

The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray , 216 pp., $94 cloth, $26.99 paper.What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael Sandel , 256 pp., $27 cloth, $15 paper.Money: The Unauthorised Biography, Felix Martin , 336 pp., £20 cloth, £9.99 paper.Money has always inspired obsession, both in those who amass it and in those who think about it. “Man will never be able to know what money is any more than he will be able to know what God is,” wrote the French financier Marcel Labordère to his friend John Maynard Keynes. The analogy is apt. Money, like God, injects infinity into human desires. To love it is to embark on a journey without end

In 1973, the philosopher George Dickie proposed an ingenious new answer to the old question: what is art? Arthood, he suggested, is not an intrinsic property of objects, but a status conferred upon them by the institutions of the art world. He accordingly attached an exemplary significance to works like Duchamp's urinal, whose very lack of intrinsic distinction focuses our attention upon their institutional context. But his theory was about art in general, and not just readymades. ‘I am not claiming that Duchamp and his friends invented the conferring of the status of art; they simply used an existing institutional device in an unusual way.’