Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Philosophy of Money, published in 1900, is a work of economic sociology arguing that money functions as a structuring agent that shapes how people understand the totality of life. Simmel examines how the rise of universal currency transformed incomparable value systems, including land, food, honor, and love, into a single quantifiable metric.
The Philosophy of Money was published in 1900. Its original German title is Philosophie des Geldes.
Simmel argues that people create value by making objects, separating themselves from those objects, and then trying to overcome that distance. Objects that are too easy to obtain or too far out of reach carry little value; scarcity, time, sacrifice, and difficulty are central to the calculation.
Simmel argues that money brings about personal freedom by replacing obligations tied to specific goods or labor with a flexible monetary payment. A peasant required to pay a tax in money, rather than in wheat or cattle, is free to pursue whatever work generates the required sum. However, Simmel also cautions that freedom from a specific obligation does not automatically become freedom to pursue any particular goal, since money is empty and points the owner in no specific direction.
The weregild was a monetary payment owed to a family when one of its members was killed. Simmel uses it to illustrate how personal values, in this case a human life, were directly expressed in monetary terms rather than calculated as compensation for lost income. He treats it as evidence that money can serve as a measure of personal worth, not just economic exchange.
Simmel explicitly compared the progressive separation of objects from people in a money economy to Marx's theory of alienation. He also compared the role of money as the all-encompassing center of economic life to Marx's concept of commodity fetishism.