“Frozen Desire” By James Buchan: As Relevant Now As Ever

“The Romanticism of the 19th century was a direct response to not only the materialist underpinnings of the Enlightenment but also the increasingly monetary-centric worldview that subsumed all human relations.”

James Buchan’s book Frozen Desire was the right book for the wrong time. When it was originally published in the mid 1990’s, the financial markets seemed triumphant. The international community was giving economic agreements such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) the same import that was once only granted to the minutiae of Cold War arms treaties. In the preceding decades, the pursuit of wealth had come to dominate all other human endeavors; to this effect, Buchan muses in the introduction: “duty, religion, public service, liberty, equality, justice or aristocracy—all the cultural flesh that clothed the bones of money for those that possessed it—all became suspect: only money, it seemed was to be trusted.”

I had originally come to know Buchan after reading Days of God, his superlative history of the revolution in Iran and its consequences. Buchan became interested in the psychology of money while working as an editor for an English-language newspaper in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970’s. He was bearing witness there to the flood of money pouring into Saudi Arabia as oil prices soared and the parochial societies of the Persian Gulf tried to cope with their new-found embarrassment of riches. After a successful career as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times that sent him from the war-torn Middle East to the crumbling Berlin Wall and finally to downtown Manhattan, he began to write novels and nonfiction.

Frozen Desire is filled with the type of flowing prose (laced with glittering vocabulary and turns of phrase) that one expects from Oxford or Cambridge graduates, and the author’s command of foreign language sources and the literature of the Western canon is most impressive. While the book professes to be a study of money’s psychology and its effect on the human experience, the book’s chapters are a collection of loosely connected essays on how we conceive of currency. And each chapter serves as a richly detailed window into various periods of financial history.

Money, the author posits, is mankind’s most powerful invention. To demonstrate the point, Buchan jumps from Aristotle to the rise of Christendom to the advent of double entry book-keeping before stepping into explaining the creation of credit and insurance. He chronicles how the financial nexus shifted from Italian city-states to gold-hungry Spain to the tulip markets of the Netherlands and finally to the British Empire. All the while, he narrates how the logic of capital accumulation spread from the European continent around the world.