6 ideas
Objects are not valuable in themselves; value emerges when an object resists our desire and we must give something up to obtain it. Exchange is the social form of this sacrifice, and economic value is the mutual measuring of one sacrifice against another, so value is relational rather than a property of things.
Money is the most perfect means because it has no qualities of its own and can be converted into anything. Because it stands at the end of so many chains of purpose, the means becomes an end in itself, and people come to desire money more than the things it buys.
When a lord accepts a money rent in place of labor or produce, the peasant is no longer bound to a specific person or task, only to a sum, and can arrange the rest of his life as he chooses. Money dissolves personal dependence into dependence on many anonymous others, which produces individual freedom and also loosens the attachments that gave life content and direction.
Once everything carries a price, the question 'how much?' crowds out 'what kind?' and qualitatively different things become comparable on one scale. The habit of exact measurement spreads from markets into daily life, making modern minds precise, punctual and intellectual while flattening distinctions that cannot be counted.
When money makes every object exchangeable for every other, things lose their distinct value and the jaded person experiences them all as the same dull grey. The cynic draws the same conclusion from the other side: if the highest and the lowest can both be bought, nothing has a worth that cannot be priced.
The division of labor that money enables piles up a vast stock of objective culture: tools, knowledge, products and institutions. Each individual can absorb only a shrinking share of it, so personal cultivation falls behind and people feel dominated by a world of things they made but cannot master.