Written by Keith Hart
What are we to make of a world society whose formation is driven by an explosive and
highly unequal combination of markets, money and telecommunications? Markets are
networks constituted by acts of buying and selling, usually through the medium of money.
For most of history, they were kept marginal to the mainstream institutions on which
societies were built. But not long ago and at first only in some parts of the world, markets
came to be accepted as central to society, leading to a vigorous political debate, which is
ongoing, about the appropriate relationship between the two. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations (1776) provided a charter for ‘the market’ as the dominant institution of modern
societies. The idea of economy, which started out as a principle of rural household
management, now became closely identified with markets, as did the profession of
economics which grew up to study them.
All the agrarian civilizations of Eurasia tried to keep markets and money in check, since
power came from the landed property of an aristocratic military caste who feared that
markets might undermine their control over society. The medieval schoolmen expressed
this as an opposition between the ‘natural economy’ of the countryside and the commerce
of the city. Earlier Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great when the Macedonian cavalry
overran the Greek cities, preferred to found society on the self-sufficiency of manorial
estates, declaring that markets geared to profit- making were anti-social (Polanyi 1957a).
This view of economy prevailed until the dawn of the modern era, when Jane Austen could
describe one of her characters as a poor ‘economist’ for her inability to handle the
servants.1 If Marx and Engels (1848) claimed that the history of class struggle had been
between town and countryside, they had this conflict between landed power and urban
commerce in mind.
Even in stateless societies, markets were usually kept marginal and subject to regulation
by the agents of dominant social institutions. Thus, markets in Africa (Bohannan and
Dalton 1962) were traditionally restricted to specific times and places, leaving the bulk of
production and consumption to be organized by kinship ties. Colonial demand for export
crops and wage labour meant that the market principle became more pervasive,
undermining the existing authorities.
Why are markets supposed to be subversive of traditional social arrangements? Because
commerce knows no bounds — all markets are in a sense world markets — and this
threatens local systems of control. They offer a potential means of escape to the
dominated classes: women, young people, serfs and slaves, ethnic minorities. The power
of long-distance merchants often modified the autonomy of local rulers; so that the
dialectic of local and global economy defined class struggle long before we came to
perceive the modern world in this way. One common ploy whereby traditional societies
tackled the problem of the market was to restrict commerce to excluded ethnic groups,
ensuring that local citizens had no access to money and that those who did lacked political
power.
Adam Smith knew what he was taking on when he proposed that society had much to gain
from markets. He did not endorse the narrow pursuit of self-interest in market
transactions; but he found it preferable to indulge this trait en masse than to concentrate
economic power in the hands of an elite, however high-minded. He stood conventional
wisdom on its head by asserting that a ‘propensity to truck and barter’ was part of human
nature and that markets had a better chance than any other means of increasing ‘the wealth of nations’. He stopped short of claiming that society’s interests were best served by unfettered markets; but these reservations have been largely forgotten since.
The last two centuries have seen a strident debate between capitalist and socialist camps
over whether markets are good or bad for society. The latter draw implicitly on the preindustrial apologists for landed rule. Karl Marx (1867) considered money to be indispensable to any complex economy and was opposed to the state in any form; but many of his socialist and communist followers were much less hostile to the state and, when not trying to outlaw markets and money, aimed to return them to the marginal position they occupied under agrarian civilization. Karl Polanyi has a foot in this camp since he acknowledged Aristotle as his master and considered ‘the self-regulating market’
to have been the principal cause of the twentieth century’s horrors (Polanyi 1944).
Socialism in the tradition of Saint-Simon (1952) acknowledges the social damage done by
unfettered markets, but wishes to retain the wealth they produce. Indeed the leading
capitalist societies all signed up for Hegel’s (1821) idea that states should try to contain the inequality of markets and ameliorate the social misery generated by them. The emphasis has now shifted from reliance on states to markets for managing national economy, replacing social democracy with a confusing mixture of liberalism and state power. The general breakdown of the 30s turned a large number of economists away from celebrating the logic of markets towards contemplating their repair. This ‘institutional economics’ persists as the notion that markets need self-conscious social intervention, if they are to serve the public interest. Polanyi should probably be placed in this category rather than as a card-carrying anti-marketeer. He did recognize a role for the market as one of several modes of distribution and aligned himself with those who sought institutional means to correct capitalism’s ills.
Market apologists likewise divide between some for whom it is a trans-historical machine
for economic improvement best left to itself and others who acknowledge a role for
enlightened public management of commerce. Classical liberals promoted markets as a
means of greater individual freedom from the arbitrary social inequality of the Old
Regime. But the industrial revolution brought about a shift to urban commerce that made
vast new populations of wage workers rely on markets for food, housing and the rest of
their basic needs. Under these circumstances, society itself seemed to retreat from view,
being replaced by an ‘economy’ characterized this time by market contracts instead of
domestic self-sufficiency. Others hold that society’s remaining defences are simply too
weak to hold out against the rising tide of global money: you can’t buck the ‘markets’.
This notion of markets as a natural force beyond social regulation serves to legitimize
wealth and even to make poverty seem deserved.
The founders of modern social theory all considered markets to be progressive in that they
broke up the insularity of traditional rural society and brought humanity into wider circles
of discourse and interaction. But they differed over what should happen next. Marx and
Engels (1848) considered that private money (‘capital’) was too fragmented to organize the
urban societies brought into being by machine production of commodities; they looked to
the large concentrations of workers for a truly collective remedy. Max Weber (1978)
recognized that the formal rationality of capitalist bureaucracy often led to a substantive
deterioration of livelihood for many. But, as a liberal, he considered wholesale state
intervention in markets to be a recipe for economic disaster. Durkheim (1893) and Mauss
(1997) were both socialists who emphasized the human interdependence entailed in an
expanded social role for markets and money, while rejecting the Social Darwinist claim
that capitalism ensures the ‘survival of the fittest’.
Polanyi (1944, 1957b) never denied the utility of markets for the allocation of some goods
and services. What he condemned was the elevation of the ‘self-regulating market’ to a
position of dominance and the high price the British working classes paid for this. Laissezfaire liberalism was not the necessary, ‘natural’ concomitant of industrialism: the market regime could only emerge and reproduce itself thanks to specific interventions by the state. At the same time, there were counter- movements within society like Chartism, as the victims of the new liberalism sought to defend themselves. This ‘double movement’ constituted the self-protection of society. Polanyi sometimes wrote of the ‘disembedding’ of economy under laissez-faire liberalism; but the market remained thoroughly ‘embedded’ in two senses: first, in its dependence on the state and second because it was associated with a range of social institutions, including some formed to counter allegedly impersonal and ‘natural’ market forces. Polanyi’s real objection was not to the market as such, but to ‘market fundamentalism’.
I find Marcel Mauss’s position on markets and money to be more persuasive than Polanyi’s
as a basis for ‘institutionalist political economy’ (Hart 2007a). The Gift (1925) is an
extended commentary on Durkheim’s (1893) argument that an advanced division of labour
could only be sustained by ‘the non-contractual element in the contract’, a largely invisible
body of state-made law, custom and belief that could not be reduced to abstract market
principles. Mauss held that the attempt to create a free market for private contracts is
utopian and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism.
Human institutions everywhere are founded on the unity of individual and society,
freedom and obligation, self-interest and concern for others. The pure types of selfish
and generous economic action obscure the complex interplay between our individuality
and belonging in subtle ways to others.
Mauss (1997) was highly critical of the Bolsheviks’ destruction of confidence in the
expanded sense of sociability that sustained the market economy. In his view, markets and
money are human universals whose principal function is the extension of society beyond
the local sphere, even if they do not always take the impersonal form we are familiar with.
This was why he disputed Malinowski’s (1921) assertion that kula valuables could not be
considered to be money (Mauss 1990: 102n). Mauss advocated an ‘economic movement
from below’, in the form of syndicalism, co-operation and mutual insurance. His greatest
hopes were for a consumer democracy driven by the co-operative movement. The true
significance for him of finding elements of the archaic gift in contemporary capitalism was
to refute the revolutionary eschatology of both right and left. Most of the possibilities for a
human economy already co-exist in our world; so the task is to build new combinations
with a different emphasis, not to repudiate a caricature of the market in the name of a
radical alternative. Here Mauss follows Hegel — rather than Aristotle, Marx and Polanyi —
in seeking the integration of institutional possibilities that have been variously dominant
in history rather than representing them as mutually exclusive historical stages.
When ‘the market’ is represented in neoliberal ideology as a force of nature giving
expression to individual interests outside society, political opponents are apt to advocate
either its abolition or at least closer control by collective interests. But this generates
unrealistic and unsustainable programs that reproduce the neo-liberal model by negation.
Mauss’s approach draws our attention to the institutional complexity of markets, while
emphasizing their evolutionary function as means of drawing humanity into society on an
ever-widening scale. Markets are thus an essential and dynamic feature of the human
economy.
Money in the human economy
By calling the economy ‘human’ we insist on putting people first, making their thoughts,
actions and lives our main concern. Such a focus should also be pragmatic: making
economy personally meaningful to students or readers, relating it to ordinary people’s
practical purposes. ‘Humanity’ is a moral quality, implying that, if we want to be good, we
should treat other persons, people like ourselves, kindly. Since theoretical abstraction is
impersonal and leaves no room for morality, a human economy would have to pay attention to the personal realm of experience; but it would be a mistake to leave it there. Humanity is also a collective noun, meaning all the people who have existed or ever will. A human economy is inclusive in a sense reinforced by our contemporary witness to the formation of world society.
Anthropologists and sociologists have long rejected the impersonal model of money and
markets offered by mainstream economics. Viviana Zelizer (1994), for example, shows that
people refuse to treat the cash in their possession as an undifferentiated thing, choosing
rather to ‘earmark’ it — reserving some for food bills, some as holiday savings and so on.
Her examples generally come from areas that remain invisible to the economists’ gaze,
especially domestic life. People everywhere personalize money, bending it to their own
purposes through a variety of social instruments. This was the message too of Money and
the morality of exchange (Parry and Bloch 1989). When money and markets are
understood exclusively through impersonal models, awareness of this neglected dimension
is surely significant. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the
family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets,
where economists remain largely unchallenged. Mauss’s notion of what it means to be
human would have us all bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a
society whose wider reaches are impersonal, much as Durkheim (1912) argued religion
does.
Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas it is a
creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead.
Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal in order to connect each individual to the
universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including
their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is
highly variable. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal
society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by
the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what
we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to
divide themselves, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some
meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps
that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always
the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to
humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the
main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.
Money thus expands the capacity of individuals to stabilize their own personal identity by
holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society. Money is a ‘memory bank’ (Hart 2000), a store allowing individuals to keep track of those exchanges they wish to calculate and, beyond that, a source of economic memory for the community. The modern system of money provides people with a wide repertoire of instruments to keep track of their exchanges with the world and to calculate the current balance of their worth in the community. In this sense, one of money’s chief functions is remembering. If the proliferation of personal credit today could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal
governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with
computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual
exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize as living people in the present. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.
The reality of markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of
the abstract and the concrete (Hart 2007b). If you have some money, there is almost no
limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment
lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it
promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and
subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the
fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. To turn our
backs on markets and money in the name of collective as opposed to individual interests
reproduces by negation the bourgeois separation of self and society. It is not enough to
emphasize the controls that people already impose on money and exchange as part of their
personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of
reaching the parts we don’t know, if we wish to avert the ruin they could bring down on us
all. As Simmel (1900) pointed out, money is the concrete expression of humanity’s
potential to make universal society.
Economic history is dialectical. Depending on impersonal and anonymous institutions
makes most people feel quite anxious. This is an immense force for reversing the historical
pattern of alienation on which the modern economy has been built. How we combine the
personal and impersonal aspects of economy has much in common with religion. Religion
binds something inside us to an external force, lending stability to meaningful interaction
with the world and providing an anchor for our volatility. What we know intimately is
our own everyday life; but this life is subject to larger forces whose origins we do not know – natural disasters, social revolutions and death. We recognize these unknown causes of our fate to be at once individual and collective. Religion is the organized attempt to bridge the gap between the world of ordinary experience and an extraordinary world that lies beyond it; and Durkheim (1912) showed us that what is ultimately unknown to us is our collective being in society. The chaos of everyday life thus attains a measure of order to the extent that it is informed by ideas representing the social facts of a shared existence. Our task today is to assume responsibility for life as a whole on this planet and religion is indispensable to that end. Roy Rappaport, in his monumental Ritual and religion in the making of humanity (1999), proposed ecology as a substitute for the false religion of money peddled by the economists. In my view, money could be made to work for common human ends (Hart 2006a).
(to be continued…)
Part 3
The days are long gone when politicians could concern themselves with affairs of state and
profess ignorance of the livelihoods of the masses. Hence Bill Clinton’s famous memo to
himself, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ The reason is that voters care more about what affects
their own jobs or mortgages than political parties; and that is a force for greater
democracy. For millennia, economy was conceived of in domestic terms. Then, when
markets, money and machines began their modern rise to social dominance, a new
discipline of political economy was born, concerned with the public consequences of
economic actions. For over a century now, this discipline has called itself economics and
its subject matter has been the economic decisions made by individuals, not in their
domestic capacity, but as participants in markets of many kinds. People as such play
almost no part in the calculations of economists and they find no particular reflection of
themselves in the quantities published by the media.
The last century saw a universal experiment in impersonal society (Hart 2005). Humanity
was everywhere organized by remote abstractions – states, capitalist markets, science. For
most people it became impossible to make a meaningful connection with these anonymous
institutions and this was reflected in disciplines whose structures of thought had no room
for human beings in them.
Anthropologists aim to produce an understanding of the economy that features people, in
two senses. First, we are concerned with what people do and think, both as workers or
consumers in economies dominated by large-scale organizations and when left relatively
free to be self-organized as farmers, traders, managers of households or givers of gifts.
Second, our interest is in the universal history of humanity; and our examples are drawn
from all over the world. Somehow we have to find meaningful ways of bridging the
gap between the two. Whereas anthropologists once studied stateless peoples for lessons
about how to construct better forms of society, scientific ethnographers no longer
sought to change a world in which they probably felt as disempowered as most people.
Of course, people everywhere continued to express themselves where they could – in domestic life and informal economic practices. But the three most important components of modern economy – people, machines and money – were not properly addressed by the academic discipline devoted to its study. In Capital, Marx (1867) expressed humanity’s modern estrangement by making abstract value (money) organize production, with the industrial revolution as its instrument and people reduced to the passive anonymity of their labour power. He aimed to reverse this order of priority and so should we.
1. Order, Management
2. Efficient conservation of resoures
3. Practical affairs
4. Money, wealth
5. The market
These meanings refer to a wide range of social units. The Greek word oikonomia referred
to the imposition of order on the practical affairs of a house, usually a manorial estate with
its slaves, animals, fields and orchards. Economic theory then aimed at self-sufficiency
through careful budgeting and the avoidance of trade, where possible. The market, with its
rootless individuals specialized in money-making, was the very antithesis of an economy
that aimed to conserve both society and nature. In origin ‘economy’ emphasized the first
three above while focusing on the house as its location. This ideal persisted in Europe up to
the dawn of the modern age. The economy has moved on in the last 2,500 years and
especially in the last two centuries. Smith’s intellectual revolution switched attention from
domestic order to ‘political economy’ and especially to the functioning of markets. Two
things happened next. First, the market was soon dominated by firms commanding
massive resources, a system of making money with money eventually named as ‘capitalism’
by Werner Sombart (1902). Second, states claimed the right to manage money, markets
and accumulation in the national interest; and this is why today ‘the economy’ usually
refers to the country we live in.
The question of world economy has encroached on public consciousness of late; and
almost any aggregate from associations of states like the European Union to localities,
firms and households may be said to have an ‘economy’. In the process, ‘economy’ has come
to refer primarily to the money nexus of market exchange, even though we retain the
old meaning of making ends meet, of efficient conservation of resources. The word
contains within itself this historical shift. But that isn’t all. It is by no means clear whether
economy is primarily subjective or objective. Does it refer to an attitude of mind or to
something out there? Is it ideal or material? Does it refer to individuals or to collectives?
Perhaps all of these — in which case, we need to explore the links between them. Moreover,
if the factory revolution shifted the weight of economy from agriculture to industry, the
economy now takes the primary form of electronic bits whizzing around cyberspace. It is
still an urgent priority to secure provision of material necessities for the world’s poor; but
for a growing number of people a focus on economic survival no longer makes sense, even
less withdrawal from the market. The confusion at the heart of the concept reflects not
only an unfinished history, but also wide differences in contemporary economic
experience.
One way of cutting through this confusion would be to retain the original definition of
economy while applying it to a world shaped increasingly by markets. ‘Economy’ means
putting one’s house in order, both practically and figuratively. Are markets compatible
with that notion or should the two be seen as inevitably opposed or at best
complementary? In other words, what might the phrase ‘market economy’ mean, if it is not
an oxymoron? This has the advantage of reminding us of the centrality of kinship in
society. If coping with the world at large requires each of us to be highly self-reliant, we
enter it as members of households and base our most intimate and long-term strategies for
life on them. Meyer Fortes (1969), who more than any anthropologist insisted on this fact,
preferred to talk about the ‘development cycle of domestic groups’ (Goody 1958) rather
than households or families.
The idea that social structures are reproduced through ordinary human outcomes of birth,
copulation and death reinforces a focus on the ‘householding’ dimension of economic
order. Stephen Gudeman (2001, 2008) has developed a powerful case for considering
economy everywhere as a dialectic of base (house and by extension community) and
market; Richard Wilk (1989) has long made a special study of the role of households in
economy; Chris Gregory (2009) has recently explored what happened to householding as a
mode of economic integration in Polanyi’s later work; and Sandy Robertson (1987, 1991)
has long focused on these aspects of social reproduction. My choice of emphasis is nothing
new.
Where Aristotle went wrong was in imagining that houses could aspire to a condition of
autarky, detached from markets drawing them into ever-widening circuits of interdependence with the rest of the world. Thrift may be a useful virtue; but selfsufficiency is a practical impossibility.
Economic history could then be seen as a process whereby the house was subsumed under
more inclusive social units (kingdom, city, nation, world), where its principles of order
took on new meaning in larger-scale applications. Thus manorial estates, monasteries,
temples and palaces were all ways of extending the house principle to the larger society
and each were crucibles of innovation in economic ideas and practices from which modern
institutions still draw. If the natural theology of Aquinas and the medieval schoolmen
made ‘economy’ a divine principle of cosmic order (Wood 2002), the cities that grew up in
the interstices of feudal society sponsored their own ‘bourgeois’ phase of economy. Later
the nation-state became the main vehicle for economy; and only recently has the world
economy become something more than a figure of speech. The dynamic force pushing out
the boundaries of society was the market, with warfare and religion also playing their part.
There surely has to be more to it than a straight choice between controlling the market in
the name of society and conceiving of the market as society’s sole means of development.
Whereas Polanyi thought that markets could only serve society if subjected to non- market
principles, Mauss believed that human aspirations for social justice could best be achieved
through self-organized market expansion and not despite it. This philosophical argument
is being played out right now in the argument between Clinton and Obama over
healthcare in the United States, where the issue is whether or not the state is
indispensable to economic democracy.
You may well ask what sort of order ‘economy’ entails and what its means of social
expression are. How, if at all, can keeping a house in order be reconciled with the
institutionalization of formal rationality as market economics or state bureaucracy (Weber
1978)? This should be the focus of a whole research programme; but, briefly, the key term
is ‘form’ — an idea whose origin lies in the mind (Hart 2006b). Form is the rule, the
invariant in the variable. It is predictable and easily recognized. That is why idealist
philosophers from Plato onwards thought the general idea of something was more real
than the thing itself. Words are forms, of course.
In his Science of Logic (1811-1816), Hegel showed the error of taking the idea for reality.
We all know the word ‘house’ and might think there is nothing more to owning one than
saying ‘my house’. But before long the roof will leak, the paint will peel and we are forced
to acknowledge that the house is a material process that requires attention. The ‘formal
sector’ is likewise an idea, a collection of people, things and activities; but we should not
mistake the category for the reality it identifies. What makes something ‘formal’ is its
conformity with a rule. The idea of an ‘informal economy’ is entailed by the institutional
effort to organize society along formal lines. For most of the twentieth century the
dominant forms have been those of bureaucracy, particularly of national bureaucracy,
since society has become identified to a large extent with nation-states. This identity may
now be weakening in the face of the neo-liberal world economy and the digital revolution
in communications. In any case, Kant’s dialectic of form and substance is a unity and, as
William Blake said before Hegel, “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars, and
every Particular is a Man” (Jerusalem, 1804). My chief complaint against economics and
much else in contemporary social science is not its emphasis on forms of reason, but their
detachment from lived social reality.
The ‘informal economy’ (Hart 2006b) was intended to draw attention to what people were
really up to beyond the reach of state regulation; but, as the negation of bureaucracy, it
offered no clue to the forms of social life through which they organized these activities.
These are legion: kinship, friendship, locality, religion, ethnicity, criminal fraternity,
labour unions, savings clubs and creative combinations of any or all of these. What they
have in common is the need to stabilize the flux of everyday life in reasonably predictable
ways; and the tradition of British social anthropology in its classical phase, drawing on
comparative jurisprudence to make fine-grained analyses of customary institutions
(Evans-Pritchard 1951), still has a lot to offer in this regard. It is quite a leap to ask how
such a particularistic approach might help us all feel more at home in today’s world, but
since I have made that transition in my own development, it is not impossible.
What would it take to impose rational order on world economy? Keynes’s example (1936)
would suggest that national responses to the last great economic crisis (in a word,
redistribution) might be transposed to global conditions today. But this would require a
new set of political institutions at the global level. Contemporary environmentalism may
contain the seeds of a religious revival that could sweep away the neo-liberal consensus.
But if this took the form of repudiating markets and money, the consequences could be
even worse.
Economic anthropology
It would be wrong to speak of the relationship between economics and anthropology as a
dialogue. Economists in the neoclassical tradition have rarely expressed any interest in
anthropology and none at all since their discipline became the dominant ideological and
practical arm of global capitalism. Anthropologists, on the other hand, have usually felt
obliged to address the perspective of mainstream economists, sometimes applying their ideas and methods to exotic societies, more often being critical of the discipline’s claim to be universally valid. Since anthropologists have based their intellectual authority on the fieldwork method, discourse in economic anthropology has generally concerned the interpretation of economic ideas in the light of ethnographic findings. Is the economists’ aspiration to place human affairs on a rational footing an agenda worthy of anthropologists’ participation or just a bad dream? I have already indicated here why economic anthropology might benefit from seeking to integrate house and market, ecology and economy within a humanist vision of our moment in world history. Agreeing on a common label for humanizing study of the economy matters less than identifying clear questions for collaborative inquiry.
With this in mind, we could return to the modern discipline’s origin in Immanuel Kant’s
late work. In publishing his lectures on anthropology, Kant (2006 [1798]) aimed to attract
the general public to an independent discipline whose name he more than anyone
contributed to academic life. Kant’s method was based on empirical observation, but he
also sought to provide his students with practical guidance and knowledge of the world as
a means of their moral and cultural improvement. It was both an investigation into human
nature and, especially, into how to modify it. He intended the Anthropology to be ‘popular’
and of value in later life. Above all, it was to contribute to the progressive political task of
uniting world citizens by identifying the source of their ‘cosmopolitan bonds’. The book
thus moves between mundane illustrations and Kant’s most sublime vision, using
anecdotes close to home as a bridge to horizon thinking.
Kant concentrated on the pragmatic applications of anthropology — ‘what the human
being as a free actor can and should make of himself’. Anthropology for him was the
practical arm of moral philosophy. It does not explain the metaphysics of morals, which
are categorical and transcendent; but it is indispensable to understanding any interaction
involving human agents. It is ‘pragmatic’ in a number of senses: ‘everything that pertains
to the practical’, popular (as opposed to academic) and moral in that it concerns what
people should do, their motives for action. He felt that the main value of his book lay in its
systematic organization, so that readers could incorporate their experience into it and
develop new themes appropriate to their own lives.
Kant is the main source for the notion that society may be as much an expression of
individual subjectivity as a collective force out there. In order to understand the world, we
must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience itself and in all the judgments we have made. The world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before drawing on the laws imposed on each of us from above. Kant attempted to address the emergence of world society directly. His notion of anthropology as a form of humanist education contrasts starkly with the emphasis on scientific research in today’s universities.
We feel at home in intimate, face-to-face relations; but we must engage in remote, often
impersonal transactions at distance. Improvements in telecommunications cannot stop
until we can replicate at distance the experience of face-to-face interaction. For the drive
to overcome alienation is even more powerful than alienation itself. Social evolution has
reached the point of establishing near-universal communications; now we must make
world society in the image of our own humanity.
A lot more political education is needed before people can exchange dependence on an
impersonal economic system for the capacity to alter their personal relationship to money
and markets in meaningful ways (Hart 2007b). Economic anthropology should aim to show
that the numbers on people’s financial statements, bills, receipts, and transaction records
constitute a way of summarizing their relations with society at a given time. The next step is to explain where these numbers come from and how they might serve in building a viable personal or household economy. When people can take responsibility for their own economic actions, they will understand better the social forces impinging on their lives. Then it will become more obvious how and why ruling institutions need to be reformed for all our sakes.
If plastic credit cards could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this
also entails increased dependence on the impersonal organization of governments and
corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations
and on the need for impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange.
Once we accept that money is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate, it could take a wide variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and collective forms of association at every level from the local to the global. It is up to us to build them.
‘Anthropology’ is indispensable to the making of world society in the coming century. It
would then mean whatever we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build
a more equal world. This usage could be embraced by some students of history, sociology,
political economy, philosophy and literature, as well as by anthropologists. Many
disciplines might contribute without being exclusively devoted to it. The idea of
‘development’ has played a similar role in the last half- century. It matters less that an
academic guild should retain its monopoly of access to knowledge than that ‘economic
anthropology’ should be taken up by a broad intellectual coalition for whom the realization
of a new human universal – a world society fit for humanity as a whole — is a matter of
urgent personal concern.
Acknowledgments
Keynote lecture for a conference, ‘Rethinking economic anthropology: a human centred approach’, held in London, 11-12 January 2008:
http://www.rethinkingeconomies.org.uk/econ_keynote.asx. I am grateful to Catherine Alexander for organizing this event and for her support more generally. I draw here freely on my work with Chris Hann in editing a collection of critical essays on Polanyi (Hann and
Hart 2009) and preparing a textbook on economic anthropology (Hann and Hart 2011).
Perspectives in Anthropology 