Bohdan Shumylovych Paper money and its (urban) images: toward capitalist metaphysics (The case of the former Soviet Union) • Monetary politics and the modern state system • Money and capitalist metaphysics • Making the modern paper money: the appearance of images The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture Martin Heidegger 1 Introduction Nail Ferguson launches his study on the monetary politics in the modern age (Ferguson, 2002) citing Thomas Carlyle. The latter is very well known for his fear that modernity would turn all human relations into economic affairs and in this way people can be changed into modern monsters. He was constantly moralizing that we (humans) have forgotten that cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings (Carlyle shaped the term ‘cash nexus’, which is now frequently used). Ferguson’s “Cash Nexus” tends to show that actually we are not bonded completely to economic relations and homo sapience is not home economicus, constantly aiming to maximize his effectiveness with every transaction. People very often have unpredictable behavior and their reasons can be illogical and emotional. But nevertheless we still believe that money, and certainly economics makes ‘the world go around’. In this study I aim to investigate the cultural role that money plays in the West. My assumptions are based on the symbolical character of the inter-human and inter-national communication. Although there are always practical reasons, which stay behind different cultural phenomena, symbolical aspects may play a crucial role in such spheres as economics and politics. European historians in the 19 th century described the progressive development of English, French, 1 Heidegger M. ‘The age of the world picture’, In: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. – N.Y., 1997. 1