Beyond the State and the Market
To get to the bottom of the problems of the ‘political’ and of the gap between technology and values that characterise it today, we will need to adopt a perspective beyond the state-market coupling.
For the most part, this theoretical and methodological assumption is drawn from the work of Karl Polanyi. In this chapter, we shall attempt to approach his work from the perspective of ‘social philosophy’. We will take our cue from the themes for which Polanyi has become famous: the comparative analysis of the diverse ancient and archaic economic systems. Polanyi is an intrepid thinker. His inquiry winds along the borderline between different areas of influence and distinct disciplinary territories: history and ‘science of culture’, social theory and economic anthropology. We will initially draw these themes together on the basis of the results provided by the reception of his celebrated work The Great Transformation, which was dedicated to the passage of the Western economy from the system of the ‘self-regulated market’ in the 1800s to the ‘organised capitalism’ of the 1930s. We will then demonstrate that the two lines of investigation are interdependent and interact with one another.
The aim of this chapter is to gauge the possibility of taking up again the fundamental categories of Polanyi’s investigation – ‘gift’ and ‘exchange’, ‘political obligation’ and ‘social bond’ – from the perspective of a social and political philosophy capable of transcending the classic modern hendiadys of market and state. Even if the dichotomies that turn on this couple are – on following Polanyi’s work – thought to be secondary forms of sociality, the modern philosophical and political debate, and the theoretical-economic one as well, appears largely polarised by the opposition between state and market, and by the false alternatives or pendulum swings to which it gives rise. A good example of this is the ongoing discussion on privatisation as a response to the crisis of the welfare state. The therapies proposed seem to make way for an ideological division between the champions of the state and those of the market. The problematic of a difficult choice and decision appears to result in a drastic either/or between a social configuration of the economy regulated by state authority and one where privatisations are said to establish a free-market society that is emancipated from bureaucratic-administrative tutelage, as well as from the fiscal bonds of the ‘great Leviathan’. What escapes the ‘current’ debate is that the important element – i.e., the properly political dimension – is situated between the state and the market. Hannah Arendt diagnosed a ‘public sphere’ caught in the pincer composed by the poles of the Leviathan state, with its centralised institutions, and civil society, reduced to the sphere of production and labour, to a system of needs and mercantile competition. Still today (and perhaps more so than yesterday) this appears as a literal and faithful account of our political present. Therefore, to posit the need to overcome the dichotomy of state and market is to question the real factors that make up the social bond. It involves one going in search of that primary institution of society that is the presupposition of any form of conventional institution – be it ‘artificial’ or ‘contracted’ – and thus of the Leviathan itself. That is, of the state understood in terms of its modernity, constructed in accordance with the formal criteria of the ius publicum. The logic of institutionalisation must be understood as a process whose roots are buried in a social bond whose normativity operates on a much deeper level than that of the practices that institute the social contract, or of the codes and formal rules that guide action and its rationality. Polanyi’s perspective aims to pierce the screen of rationality in order to grasp the dynamic that operates behind it, silently supporting and nourishing it.
Overcoming the antithesis or the complementary duality of market and state goes hand in hand with the theoretical need – felt in many areas today – to rethink the question of community in relation to the status of the modern individual. In so doing, the classical contraposition of individualism and holism is overcome as well. A preliminary clarification is necessary at this stage. The thesis that I am about to state does not merely gloss and integrate Polanyi’s argument but – rather – puts it in question. As Alfredo Salsano has correctly observed, the relation between the state and market society is never theorised adequately by Polanyi. One could – to be provocative – assert that the specifically modern market (characterised by the ‘invisible hand’) is literally unthinkable without the legal regulative and administrative dispositifs established by the sovereignty of the state and by the system of relations that has emerged between sovereign states. Absolutism and mercantilism are coeval. Colbert would not have been conceivable without a Sun King. An all-too-familiar ideology of our time – widespread not only in economics but also in mainstream political science – exalts the thaumaturgy of an undifferentiated market, reduced to an amorphous notion, forgetting (and leading us to forget) that the market has always been a ‘determinate market’ and that the modern capitalist market is nothing but one of the diverse forms of market that have successively arisen in the course of the history of human societies.
Pressing our provocation further, we could add that the current global age, far from sanctioning the triumph of liberal-competitive rationality, appears to be marked by a crisis of the market provoked – to be precise – by the crisis of that sovereign nation state which had made possible, through its dispositifs of internal and international rules, the birth and development of a historically ‘determinate’ market, rationalised in the form of the contract, i.e., of the exchange between abstract, legally ‘free’ and ‘equal’ subjects. In short, in the current process of globalisation we discover a mercantile arena over which the uncertainty of law and the precariousness of rules reign supreme. So neither the ‘heaven on Earth’ of the market that brings history to an end nor the spectre of World Government is able to provide us with the cipher of the new phase. It is marked, rather, by a competitive game between financial capital unchained from productive processes and allocated in ‘real time’ from one point to the other of the planet. New, frequently anonymous powers operate incalculable concentrations of ‘nomadic’ money over which the single states, including the United States of America, are – literally – powerless. Neo-liberal apologetics, which even appears to have taken root in some sectors of political philosophy, should take lessons in disenchantment from the most lucid operators of international finance. Were it do so, it would quickly learn – from the words of Joseph Stiglitz or, even, of George Soros – that the pervasive reigning rhetoric of the ‘global’ is based upon a false premise: that the activity of private capital, once this has been liberated from the institutional ties and bindings, spontaneously adjusts the dynamic of the system towards a stable point of equilibrium. In reality, as was demonstrated only a few years ago by the South-East Asian stock market crisis, the exact opposite is true. The system tends towards instability. Moreover, this instability comes not from the outside but from the inside. It is not the product of some ‘exogenous’ trauma. It depends, instead, on factors that are in each and every way ‘endogenous’, innate to the physiology of the system of international markets and exchanges in the current interregnum between the old inter-state framework and a new framework that has yet to be defined. The idea that the ‘free market’ tends naturally towards equilibrium comes from classical political economy. As the experts in the field know all too well, experience demonstrates that this may be true as far as ordinary goods are concerned but not for financial markets. The instability of this type of market depends upon the importance assumed by the psychological element of expectations. The most sophisticated economic theories, those that have been accustomed to draw on the results of anthropology and other social sciences, have for some time indicated the decisive function of symbolic factors in the dynamic of the market – I am thinking above all, but not exclusively, of the works of Albert O. Hirschman. A reflexive feedback effect that modifies the course of things interferes in all human behaviour. The ‘reflexivity’ inherent to the symbolic dimension of expectation assumes a particular degree of intensity precisely in financial markets. Our expectations concerning the future influence the current value of money, of stocks and shares at the very time they are exchanged. But precisely because expectations escape quantification, it follows that financial markets can oscillate far beyond equilibrium and never rebalance.
The philosophy of a major market operator such as George Soros thus appears more disenchanted and penetrating than that of many ‘professional philosophers’.
There is much talk about imposing market discipline, but if imposing market discipline means imposing instability, how much instability can society take? Market discipline needs to be supplemented by another discipline: maintaining stability in financial markets ought to be the objective of public policy. This is the general principle that I should like to propose.
Despite the prevailing belief in free markets this principle has already been accepted and implemented on a national scale…. But we are sadly lacking in the appropriate financial authorities in the international arena. We have the Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF and the World Bank – which have tried valiantly to adapt themselves to rapidly changing circumstances. Admittedly, the IMF programs have not been successful in the current global financial crisis; its mission and its methods of operation need to be reconsidered. I believe additional institutions may be necessary.1
Despite the technocratic illusion that can be detected in this final proposal, Soros’ diagnosis posits three demands that are difficult to escape:2 1) a differential analysis of the market form; 2) the observance of the ‘non-mercantilist’ presuppositions of the regulation and functioning of the market; 3) the critique of the paradigm of equilibrium understood as the natural vocation of the free market. This last motif – the disenchantment concerning the ‘self-regulated market’ – brings us back to the theme that lay at the heart of Polanyi’s analysis of the ‘great transformation’.
The Great Transformation was composed in 1944 but, as Michele Cangiani has correctly noted, it was assimilated only much later. It is little consolation that the thirty-year delay in the appearance of an Italian edition is less than the forty-year delay in the French translation. Nonetheless, in this case the date of publication is not unimportant to the fate of the work. Given the time it was published in Italy, 1974, it is entirely natural that it became – for the most part – incorporated into the debate on ‘neo-corporativism’ and ‘corporatist pluralism’ that, at that time, was particularly intense. This created enormous problems of an interpretive and historiographical order. The motifs that were emphasised to bring the analysis up to date meant that the overall design of the work was overlooked. Conceived as an interpretation of the origins of our time within the mitteleuropean milieu of the great Viennese culture, the Vienna of the exchange between diverse cultural and disciplinary languages, the author linked those origins (following a periodisation that was not at all obvious or, as we shall see, painless) to the period between the wars. Cangiani has observed that the book is characterised by the will to contest the neo-liberal tendencies of Hayek and Schumpeter’s theorisation of neo-classical democracy of the time, in a sort of transatlantic continuation of the celebrated Viennese disputes. George Dalton underlined how Polanyi was, fundamentally, captivated by two great problems throughout his investigations. The first was that of the origin, growth and transformation of capitalism in the nineteenth century. The second problem was, more generally, that of the relation between economy and society. The centrality of this latter theme shows Polanyi’s connection with another great social scientist of the 1900s, Max Weber, although they are distinguished by their distinct interpretations of the link between economy and society in primitive and ancient cultures. A first set of difficulties arises here. To speak of primitive and ancient systems brings us to a peculiarity of Polanyi’s path of investigation. He argued that the ancient phases of Western culture are able to furnish important interpretive results when compared to so-called primitive cultures, which form the object of anthropology. The core of the thesis consists in the equal treatment given to ‘ancient’ and ‘primitive’, historical distance and cultural distance, that is, by defining the distant peoples studied by ethnologists in the same way as ancient peoples ‘contemporaneous with us’. The theoretical weight given to this analogy gives us the measure of the divergence between Polanyi’s and Weber’s ‘comparativism’. Although Weber robustly underlines the exceptionalism of Occidental culture in comparison to other cultures, he also maintains that its ‘singularity’ – as we saw in the first chapter – does not begin with the modern. Rather, it has its origins in those typical features of okzidentaler Rationalismus, the early signs of which he glimpsed in the ancient world (Greek logos, Jewish prophecy, Roman legal rationalism). We will come back to this aspect, which is crucial in so many ways. Returning to Polanyi, it is important to note that the two thematic axes that we identified as central to his work – the enquiry into the origin, growth and transformation of nineteenth-century capitalism, and the examination of the relationship between economy and society in primitive and ancient systems – are strictly interdependent. Indeed, when we observe Polanyi’s intellectual development, we see how the comparative analysis of ancient and archaic systems has the function of clarifying the present, i.e., what was happening in the contemporary world with the crisis of industrialisation. In his eyes, this crisis constituted an epochal threshold that was able to elucidate the sense of the decline of the ideology of the self-regulated market itself, that is, of that doctrine of laissez-faire which represented the compendium and cipher of nineteenth-century, Victorian-Mancunian, capitalism. In one of his most important articles, ‘Our Obsolete Market Mentality’ (1947), Polanyi underlined that the fundamental problem is that of understanding how the exit from industrialisation can result in a new technological framework that is not destructive of the environment but that is able to merge with and adapt to the needs of human existence. It is not easy to discover such a precocious sign of the ecological thematic, even for someone who is used to interdisciplinary raids. Returning to our problem: can these two poles of Polanyi’s work be defined in terms of a ‘short wave’ and a ‘long wave’? The short wave – relatively short anyway, since we are talking of one hundred and fifty years of history, that is, of the period that begins with the start of industrialisation until the end of the hundred years’ peace that is marked by the outbreak of the First World War – coincides with the parabola of ‘liberal-competitive’ capitalism and what Polanyi considered to be a veritable utopia more than an ideology: the idea of a self-regulated market that was able to stabilise itself with autonomous and independent rational dispositifs. This market, according to Polanyi, goes definitively into crisis in 1929. The Wall Street Crash drags down with it the ‘great illusion’ of maintaining the stability of productive growth without some form of regulation. By examining the Great Crash, Polanyi raises – with a display of radicalism unknown to the ‘enlightening’ debates of our day – a problem that Keynes had already posed when analysing the first years of Soviet Russia. He asked himself if the drive for acquisition and earning can truly be considered a natural disposition of humanity. A crucial aspect comes into view here, one that tends to be casually overlooked or to become ideologically rigid in the work of today’s economic theorists. The question raised by Keynes was worthy of a classic of political economy. By posing it, the Bloomsbury Group economist was touching the confines [i confini] of economics and ethics – political economy and moral philosophy – raising the question, as Adam Smith did, of the deep anthropological roots of political economy. Does something exist that, by its persistence and homogeneity, is able to support the definition of ‘human nature’? If it exists, to what extent can we legitimately affirm that it is univocally characterised by egotism, by the acquisitive drive, the propensity to earn and the pure maximisation of profit? These are – practically letter for letter – Polanyi’s questions. They are the crucial questions underpinning the ‘long wave’ of his analysis.
Economy and Society: Karl Marx and Max Weber
The attention paid to the long wave – to the thousand-year-old relationship between economy and society, within which the liberal market economy represents nothing but a segment or episode – leads Polanyi to an enquiry into the meaning of ‘modern capitalism’ in accordance with the developments of the social science of his day. It is the same question asked by Marx and Weber, Sombart and Schumpeter, and all the great social scientists of the 1800s-1900s. What is ‘modern capitalism’? In the same way as his illustrious predecessors, Polanyi looks for an answer per differentiam – in his case through a comparison with ancient and primitive societies. We will see this more clearly below. But before we do so, let us pause to consider this short wave for a little longer.
We have already hinted at the controversial aspects of the periodisation proposed by the Hungarian theorist. Situating the ‘great transformation’ in the 1930s has raised a number of lively reactions amongst historiographers. The sharpness of the disagreements can be explained by the size of the stakes of Polanyi’s thesis. Does the rupture consist in the First World War or in the 1929 Crash? If the ‘hundred years’ peace’ concludes with the First World War – as Polanyi maintains – should the rupture not be situated there? The dilemma affects the interpretation of a decisive moment of recent history [storia contemporanea] that still concerns us today: the shift from the framework of the 1920s to that of the 1930s. Depending on the different periodisations, we can – to this day – still hear the echo of two distinct and contrasting interpretive choices echo in the ‘conflict of interpretations’ concerning the traits of the twentieth century. Consider, for example, the recent dispute around the notion of ‘short century’ or ‘long century’ that followed the publication of Eric J. Hobsbawm’s book. In brief, those who privilege the 1930s – like Polanyi and many other thinkers, amongst whom we can mention Georges Bataille or, on other grounds, Hannah Arendt – identified the hermeneutic key for the interpretation of the twentieth century in the concept of ‘totalitarianism’. Those, on the other hand, who privilege the 1920s focus their attention on the notion of ‘mass society’. If the break lies in the constitution of mass society, the 1920s, with the emergence of the middle classes and the ‘corporatist pluralist’ articulation of the interests that typify them, constitute a decisive exit from the dichotomous ‘classist’ structure of nineteenth-century capitalism. A good example of this second approach is provided by a work that was published in Italy at much the same time as The Great Transformation, namely the American historian Charles S. Maier’s Recasting Bourgeois Europe. The comparative analysis it rested upon – concentrating on three cases, Germany, France and Italy – focused upon the decade that followed the end of the First World War, namely 1918 to the crisis in 1929.
What are the advantages and what are the risks of situating the break in the 1930s? Without a shadow of a doubt the advantage consists in signalling the strategic significance of the New Deal and of the so-called Keynesian State (although, as is well known, Keynes had no time for Roosevelt’s policy). Then again, making the break absolute involves a somewhat risky consequence: the assimilation – under the rubric of ‘politics of the masses’ – of diverse regimes, such as fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and the New Deal. The new phase, characterised by the intervention of the state and by the inclusion of the masses within the political-institutional dynamic, would thereby end up exhibiting two divergent results: on the one hand, the theme of Keynesianism and the New Deal, typically thought of as the apex of the twentieth century; on the other, its perverse double, totalitarianism (a category as comprehensive as it is generic, such that it is able to include national-socialist and fascist dictatorships, as well as the Soviet or Stalinist one). There is no doubt that this line of interpretation is still prevalent. Today we witness a revival of what Franz Neumann, in strongly critical terms, called Totalitarismustheorie, the theory of totalitarianism. Although this is the dominant line of interpretation, already in the 1970s some historians questioned whether this obsessive concentration on the category of totalitarianism did not result in one losing sight of certain essential differences and distinctions – for example, between the fascist regime and the Nazi one, and between both of these dictatorships and Stalinism – and by so doing, hiding one decisive element: the ‘great transformation’ that invests the state in the thirties does not annul but, rather, introjects the pluralistic-conflictual framework that the thirties had inherited from mass society of the twenties. The adoption of Pluralismustheorie as hermeneutic key was mediated by the return of the idea, which in part can be traced back to Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, according to which the very dynamic of the dictatorships is conditioned – in its very foundation – by a precarious equilibrium between different ‘bodies’ and power blocs in reciprocal conflict. On this interpretation, the resulting war turns out to be nothing other than the inevitable projection outwards of contradictions that appear irresolvable within each single regime. Were we to continue with this ‘deconstruction’ of the concept of totalitarianism – which turns on Hobbes’ dichotomy of Leviathan and Behemoth – we would have to conclude that the return today of Totalitarismustheorie finds itself subject to the serious risk of becoming ideological. Many contemporary readings of the work of Hannah Arendt appear to move in this direction. These develop an interpretation of twentieth-century mass society that is dangerously generic when compared to the terms in which the problem was posed in the great work of Neumann on the structure of National Socialism, which has influenced the work of some historians and social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s.
We come now to the crucial question underpinning the ‘long wave’ in Polanyi’s work: the definition of modernity and of modern capitalism. His thesis appears as the exact opposite – although not necessarily the antithesis – of Max Weber’s. To conclude, I shall try to explain why this reversal of Weber’s position can be summed up – in terms different from Polanyi’s own – as the privileging of the optics of normativity in contrast to that of rationality. Whereas the social sciences have, to this day, shaped their standards of rationality on the model of action-towards-an-end which was essentially economic (based upon the utilitarian cost/benefit analysis), Polanyi understands the social import of the economic normatively.
We shall set aside, for now, the distinction between rationality and normativity, and turn to an analysis of the way that Polanyi confronts one of the topos of twentieth-century philosophy and social science: the parallel between Karl Marx and Max Weber. In his view, Marx’s limit consists in his ignoring that the economic is dominant only in capitalist society. In a section, significantly entitled ‘Economy and Society’, of the collection of Polanyi’s essays edited by George Dalton,3 he writes: ‘The discovery of the importance of the “economic” under a market economy induced him to overstress the influence of the economic factor generally, at all times and places. This proved a grave mistake’.4 If this was Karl Marx’s error, what was Weber’s? The answer is equally significant. Weber’s limit consists in his considering the economic through a lens provided for him by Marx. This identification of a limitation involves no desire to denigrate. Indeed, Weber shares the Marxian influence with the main non-Marxist social scientists of his time: from Ferdinand Tönnies to Werner Sombart, and Franz Oppenheimer to Karl Lamprecht. But in Weber this conditioning has a paradoxical outcome. Weber accepts, at least heuristically, the primacy of the economic. However, being convinced of the supremacy of the market system, his attitude is not Marxist but ‘marketist’. Paradoxically, therefore, Weber’s ‘marketism’ is said to stem directly from Marx’s description of capitalism. According to Polanyi, the inescapable ambiguity of Weber’s notion of the ‘economic’, which is characterised by an unresolved oscillation between a substantive and a formal meaning of the term, follows from this.
To grasp the sense of this last distinction it is necessary to turn to the important article ‘Economy as Instituted Process’, in which Polanyi distinguishes the two senses of ‘economic’. He relates the substantive sense to the natural bond, that is, to the procurement of the means for the satisfaction of natural needs. The formal sense he relates to rules. In the strict sense, only action is ‘rational’ for Weber. In the case in point, only zweckrational economic behaviour, i.e., rational in relation to an end or strategic-instrumental behaviour is rational. Between the two senses of the ‘economic’ there is the same distance that separates the realm of ‘subsistence’ from that of ‘rules’. The indicator of the ambivalence is given in the core of Weber’s thesis, which presupposes the two-way relation between the economic and the rational: rationality is always economic; there is no possibility of a project outside of oikonomía, of a calculating ratio. We touch upon a very delicate matter here. Weber does not criticise Marx’s historical materialism for having put the economy at the centre of things, but for the ‘monist’ pretence of having deduced from it general laws, cancelling from the concept of ‘the economy’ its fertile tension with the ethical moment from which the dimension of rationality springs. According to Polanyi, the bond between the economic and the rational does little else but reflect the situation of capitalist economics. It is unable to operate as general principle. Thus, it is precisely Weber’s presumption of ‘universality’ that makes his schema inadequate to economic history.
Having said this, we must ask, did Weber really take the stand that Polanyi ascribes to him? This is a crucial question, one whose implications enable us, amongst other things, to begin an examination of Polanyi’s interpretation of the gift and exchange. In our view, the answer can be answered only negatively. The impression is that this reading of Weber is not far away from the sociological vulgate that has traditionally privileged his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft over his other works. However, the structure of this work – which is the result, as is well known, of an assiduous but questionable operation of ‘montage’ by his student Johannes Winckelmann – is certain to be completely taken apart in the labours around the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. Aside from the historical and philological significance of this event, it must be recalled that, already by the late 1950s, and then more intensely in the 1970s and 1980s, a new course of research emerged in Germany and the United States that contributed to shifting the centre of gravity of the interpretations of Weber from the Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft to the Religionssoziologie. The principal figures of this new line of enquiry range from Wolfgang Mommsen to Friedrich Tenbruck, from Reinhard Bendix to Wolfgang Schluchter and to Habermas himself. In this context, a decisive turn in the theoretical reconstruction of Weber’s work as a whole (and of the whole comparative framework that supports it) is without question constituted by Schluchter’s Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus. What is the common denominator, the hermeneutic quality that characterises this new line of enquiry and, particularly, this last work? The salient fact, above and beyond their different trajectories, for both Weber and Polanyi, is the exceptionalism of modern Western culture. It is worth repeating that such a thesis follows from an eminently comparative conception, which can be derived more clearly from Religionssoziologie than from Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. But there is a crucial difference. For Weber, modern capitalism, characterised by the universalisation of the Zweckrationalität (of a rationality-of-ends), does not so much represent an episode, as Polanyi maintains, so much as the high point and the point of arrival of Western rationalism. In other words, Western rationalism forms a continuous arc whose parabola constitutes, in its entirety, an exception, a unicum when compared to all other cultures. Both in the Vorbemerkung5 and in the celebrated Zwischenbetrachtung of the Religionssoziologie, 6 Weber never uses the phrase ‘only in modernity’. Instead, he repeatedly adopts the much more telling expression ‘only in the West’. Consequently, for Weber, the ‘singularity’ is not constituted only by ‘modern civilisation’ but by Western culture itself, whose genetic make-up is constituted by three fundamental elements: the Greek logos, the ratio of Roman law and Jewish prophecy. It is these traits that constitute, in their interweaving and reciprocal combination, the ‘differential’ that turns the Occident into a unicum amongst human cultures. To sum up, whereas for Polanyi the exceptional character of the modern is formed by the peculiar dominance assigned to the ‘economic’ (which separates it not only from other cultures but also from its own ancient and archaic past), in Weber the exception affects, from its very origin, the entire orbit of okzidentaler Rationalismus insofar as it forms a general process of secularisation and ‘disenchantment of the world’. From the Weberian perspective, rationality is not an autonomous value relating to some form of self-sufficiency of the economic, but is, rather, a variable dependent upon an excess. We will see more clearly later in what way this topos of symbolic excess is important for Polanyi as well. For the present, it is enough to bear in mind that, whereas the Polanyian ‘excess’ is led back to the dimension of the sacred and to the persistence of the rites of exchange modelled on the gift, the Weberian ‘excess’ – the genetic site of the ‘singularity’ of the production of the Occident’s ‘deviation’ – consists in the paradox inherent to the Entzauberung, that is, the paradox of a disenchantment that, in its advance, represses its origin, letting the irrational presuppositions of rationality fall into oblivion.
For Weber, the disenchantment of the world is – in contrast to Polanyi – a phenomenon of desacralisation and deritualisation. The practical conduct of life and the fundamental ethical and religious attitudes which this disenchantment induces upset ritual organisation and perpetually uproot social bonds. In this sense, Jewish prophecy lies at the origin of the process of disenchantment manifested in modern science’s ‘Entseelung der Natur’.7 Furthermore, this process finds in the Calvinist ethic and the puritan ethic of sects the fundamental energetic transformer enabling Western rationalism to turn its singularity into a generalised dominion, thereby producing the paradoxical dynamic of a unity that generalises itself.
‘Aristotle was right’: the Critique of Modern Individualism
In diametric opposition to Weber, Polanyi tries – as in a chemical experiment – to isolate the elements of the modern market economy from the great riverbed of the general economy of human societies ‘normally’ regulated by excess. The horizon in which his conception is situated is the one delimited by the themes of that great ethno-anthropology that starts with Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur le don (1923–1924) and is then developed theoretically by the Collège de Sociologie in the course of the 1930s. It is no coincidence that, in recent years, the French anti-utilitarian school has had a leading role in the Polanyi revival. However, I wish to distance myself from the theses avowed by MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales) for two sets of reasons. First, because I am not convinced that Polanyi’s work provides a final resolution to the relationship of the market and other forms of social bond, such as obligation. Second, because I most certainly do not believe that the alternatives within contemporary social and political theory can be derived from the antithesis between utilitarian and non-utilitarian. While generally sharing with Alain Caillé and others behind the Revue du Mauss the need for a critique of the utilitarian paradigm of rationality, I believe that their ‘anti-utilitarianism’ does not so much constitute an alternative, as the other side of the coin of utilitarianism. One will never resolve the problem by opposing to the republic of exchange the realm of the gift. As I hinted at the beginning, it is necessary instead to confront the difficult choice between rationalism and normativity. I will come back to this aspect – which is decisive for the reconstruction of the concept of ‘social philosophy’ – in the final comments of this chapter. Before doing so, let us try to reconstruct the later passages of Polanyi’s enquiry.
The fecundity of Polanyi’s perspective consists in underlining, in the face of the international debate’s drift towards veritable religions of the market, that the exchange relation is nothing but one of the factors that compete in the determination of the complexity of the social dynamic. Today, ‘our obsolescent market mentality’ in its desperate attempt to reduce to unity a multiverse of ungovernable relationships appears to issue the worst of fundamentalisms. The ethnocentric prejudice that lies at the foundation of this mentality reproduces itself by assigning to the market an exclusive on universality. If one tries to indicate, today, where the universal resides, one falls back on the banal observation that we all drink Coca-Cola, that we all dress in more or less the same manner, etc. One can find more or less everywhere the paradoxical utopia that we can call – with Marc Augé – the universalism of non-places. It is as if rules, technologies, artifices, airports, golf courses, supermarkets, fast food and Coca-Cola could make different individuals, from different continents and cultures, equal and homologous. In the presence of this ‘bad’ universality, Polanyi shows us that in reality every market is a determinate one and that no form of market can, by itself, reduce to unity an entire pluriverse of socio-cultural differences. In reality, there has never been, in the history of the market, a market that was not a ‘determinate market’ (to use an expression that appears more than once in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and that represents an important starting point for the critique of utilitarianism and of homo æconomicus). Every market is structured by different and heterogeneous dynamic factors within which the same functions play different roles. The fact that each system includes money – except for those based on barter – does not mean that money always plays the same role. The fact that in all systems there is exchange does not mean that it always plays the same role. Therefore, these categories, these containers, these forms should not be taken in the peremptory form of their definition. They must be understood in accordance with the specific variations that they assume in each system. The very function of the economy is not taken as invariable. It is defined in each instance within the dynamic of social relations, to the extent that each of the forms we are speaking of – money, exchange, market – far from constituting singular and unitary facts, represents instead a constellation, a complex of factors stemming from the same source.
Another characteristic motif of Polanyi’s conception stems from this: his critique of modern individualism. Just as the indeterminate market, the individual ‘without qualities’ of the moderns is not only ideological but, above all, utopian. So Robinson Crusoe’s world – the heart of bourgeois ideology – is pure utopia. That world is nothing other than the utopia of possessive individualism, that is, of that homo æconomicus that represents the anthropological referent of the modern market. Polanyi contrasts the idea of the social individual to the Crusoesque character of modern political economy, as does Marx. For Polanyi, individuals are not social only because they join together (although one must not forget Polanyi’s significant assertion that ‘Aristotle was right’, Man is zoon politikón, is a social animal); individuals are social for a much deeper reason: because within each individual one finds a community. Each of us is like a theatrical cavity in which the voices of communitarian traditions that have moulded and constituted us echo. Therefore, all communities – including the individuals who are constituted only in community – are nothing but institutionalisations of the exchange-gift. I will say little more about Polanyi’s critique of modern individualism, of the modern idea of individual sovereignty. Anticipating some of the arguments advanced by contemporary communitarianism and neo-Aristotelianism, Polanyi maintains that the modern affirmation of the absolute freedom and autonomy of the individual rests upon the presumption that the individual is independent of the communitarian dynamic that is alone responsible for constituting him or her. The liberal conception that presupposes the individual, which considers him or her to be already constituted instead of produced by an ‘exogenic’ (and not ‘endogenic’) process of constitution, ends up emptying the individual of meaning. By reducing the individual to an á-tomon – i.e., individuum – such a conception extrapolates from those links, those ties, those constitutive processes that alone are able to constitute him or her as an individual. It is important not to (mis)understand this critique as a devaluation of the individual in favour of the social or the collective. Polanyi is extremely interested in the fate of the individual, to the point of not wanting him impoverished to the extent of becoming pure abstraction or acquisitive marionette. In short, the valorisation of the individual is no different – as far as Polanyi is concerned – from the richness of social determinations that he or she is able to express. Naturally, when we assert that all the communities within which the individual constitutes herself – and that, at the same time, inhere in the individual – are institutionalisations of the exchange-gift, some extremely delicate problems of a theoretical, as well as semantic, nature arise.
One I will be able to mention only in passing: the problem of the convergence between the anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences and the rehabilitation of practical philosophy. This convergence is evident, above all, in the emphasis with which the theme of social integration is underlined. It must not be forgotten that, for Polanyi, exchange, reciprocity and redistribution are fundamental forms of social integration. In other words, from his perspective the social bond assumes an absolute theoretical and conceptual priority. The signal of this priority is constituted by the theme of the exchange-gift, which forms the ground of the debate between Polanyi, Mauss and Bataille. It must not be forgotten that it is from Marcel Mauss himself that George Dalton drew the phrase placed as exergue to his introduction to Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, almost constituting a seal of approval of Polanyi’s thought: ‘It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal’.8 I have italicised the adverb precisely because it marks the distance between an approach such as that of Marcel Mauss (or Karl Polanyi) and that of Max Weber. The incipit of the phrase – with the expression ‘only our Western societies’ – appears to suggest an analogy with the celebrated adage of Weber’s (which we considered above), ‘[o]nly in the West’.9 With the addition of the adverb ‘recently’, Mauss provides the occasion for Polanyi’s theme of the exceptionality represented by homo æconomicus: this exceptionality is a recent fact, a singularly modern event. Bataille understands this exceptionality in the same way, through the distinction between ‘general economy’ (characterised by phenomena of ‘excess’, like the gift and sacrifice) and ‘restricted economy’ (characterised by typically modern phenomena of production and exchange). Indeed, his text from 1933, The Notion of Expenditure, constitutes a suggestive return to a philosophico-social reconversion of Mauss’ ideas.
Bataille poses the problem of the normality of unproductive expenditure and the exceptionalism of the productive project. In other words, the productive project is an exception in the course of human society while unproductive expenditure is its resplendent norm. For Bataille, ‘normality’ is positive precisely insofar as it is the normality of excess. It is modernity which renders that excess extravagant through a disciplining (that Caillois and, following him, Foucault would turn into the focus of their investigations) which relegates to/casts into the realm of perversion what previously was a resplendent norm: the unproductive expenditure, the continuous investigation of the most intense expressions of life and personality. The notion of unproductive ‘expenditure’ is understood by Bataille as the passage from the Hegelian restricted economy to what he calls ‘general economy’. This is not the place to confront in detail the philosophical background of this operation. We shall merely signal the fundamental passages of the reading of Hegel that Bataille develops on the basis of Kojève’s analysis. This reading can be grasped in terms of the attempt to tear the negative away from the subordinate role it played within the logic of Hegelian supersession (Aufhebung).
In the modern project, as expressed by Hegelian philosophy, the negative has a ‘servile’ function. All power, all excess is somehow given a productive function. In the Hegelian dialectic, the servile nature of the negative resides in its being submitted to a logic of production and progress. But, argues Bataille, once it has been emancipated from this servile function, once it is torn away from the project, the negative magically returns to its sovereign dimension. Sovereignty consists in a type of constellation-like structure, which is not project-driven but is defined by the terms ‘excess’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘death’, ‘gift’. For Bataille, the existence of a negative finally become absolute is what properly constitutes sovereignty; in literal terms, ab-solutus, unchained from all servile bonds, in-dependent from all types of projective function or end. Sovereignty is that which presents itself as excess without useful employment. Therefore, dépense, expenditure, is the marginal quantity of energy deployed but not employed by subjects. Sovereign energy is that which is deployed in existence, but which never allows itself to be employed for something, such as for the constitution of a product or an oeuvre. Thus, sovereignty is the absence of an oeuvre. Consider the influence of this Bataillian motif of ‘inoperativity’ on recent French thought’s engagement with the notion of community (from Jean-Luc Nancy to Blanchot and Derrida). However, Bataille’s thought has a singular double-edged force. It operates not only on the plane of philosophy but also on that of socio-anthropology. Or, rather, on the borderline that, paradoxically, is also conjuncture or shared border between the two approaches. By pushing the philosophical concepts to the limit one is led to the logical and symbolic presuppositions of social order. The same occurs when one touches upon the outer margin of sociological concepts. The spirit of the Collège de Sociologie was nothing if not this practice of the border.
Bataille himself draws attention to the ‘sociological’ implications of his thesis. Since the useless and unproductive deployment of energy is the ‘normal’ way societies are cemented, the folly of modern capitalist society consists in the idea of a project directed towards the suppression – that is, the ‘overcoming’ (Aufhebung) in dialectical sense – of unproductive expenditure by the productive project. But this utopia will do nothing but lead the project itself to its death. Thus, according to Bataille, at the heart of each of our existential experiences there operates that same unproductive energy that holds society together. The ‘cement’ is not the architecture projected by rational actors coming to an agreement through a contract, by means of a convention. On the contrary, society is held together by precisely those ‘sovereign’ expressions of existence that rationalist modernity despises or relegates to the ghetto: art, laughter, eroticism and so on.
The Paradoxes of the Gift: Polanyi,
Mauss and ‘diagonal sciences’
The connections with Essai sur le don are self-evident. This text, considered by many to be the greatest work of twentieth-century anthropology, is a book of Mauss’ maturity. However, already with Essai sur le sacrifice – which he published with Hubert in 1899 at the age of twenty-seven – Mauss had lain the bases for his theory of the gift, positing the question of sacrifice as the exchange between sacred and profane mediated by the sacrificial victim. This theme would then return with that of ‘mana’. In Essai sur le don, Mauss investigates the forms taken by the exchange of gifts in different tribes. He recognised that these forms did not merely have a mercantile function, i.e., a function directed to an immediately economic end. Instead, the exchanges were symbolically dependent on the act of giving and counter-giving. The gift, because it bears with it an obligation, appears to Mauss as a foundational and autonomous element of the social bond. In other words, the significance of the gift consists in its creation of a constant circulation of objects without commercial value in accordance with precise procedures – the rules of rituals – whose only aim is that of establishing a bond between different groups. The theme of circulation is very important because it reveals how, depending on the gift, the structure of exchange is not an axial, rectilinear structure but, as Jacques Derrida has opportunely noted, a circle that describes the curved flight of the boomerang. As we have mentioned, this circuit is foundational of the social bond. What, however, guarantees the bond, the necessitating structure of the exchange which obligates one to the gift, that is, to the acceptance and restitution of the same gift? What is the energy that animates the circuit, the force that makes it move the hand that releases the boomerang? According to Mauss it is the power of mana, that same force that sustains the movement [transito] (once again, the exchange …) between sacred and profane. In the forms of exchange of archaic societies and in the so-called primitive societies that form the object of ethnology – for example, in the system of potlàc of certain indigenous populations of North America or in the exchange of goods of the Polynesian region, such as the kula described by Malinowski – it is a case of establishing what force is enclosed within the gift that makes the gift a force of obligation. Anticipating a theme that Polanyi would take up in almost identical form, Mauss argues that this force is not reducible to ‘value’. That is, it goes beyond the exchanged objects, for it is itself the true (symbolic) motive of the exchange.
The distance separating archaic civilisations from modern society is to be measured entirely in these terms. Modern language is the language of value. It is a language that permeates even the realm of ethics and interpersonal relations. To us moderns, it appears entirely natural to identify morality with the ‘sphere of values’. But ‘value’ is a term from economics. Therefore, modernity lives – to take up one of Carl Schmitt’s favourite expressions – under the Tyrannei der Werte, the ‘tyranny of values’,10 that is, where the economic and the market spheres infringe on the ethical sphere. Mauss anticipates another motif which Polanyi will discuss in a number of works: the obligating force is not reducible to value. It is precisely for this reason that the economy is not self-referential and that the self-sufficiency of the economic is mere utopia. People do not live together because they are hungry (as in the common prejudice of liberals and Marxists), they stay together for other reasons. Indeed, they live together despite the fact of being hungry. The force encapsulated in the gift and in the circuit of the gift is not reducible to material and economic value, because it is a symbolic force, it is a symbolic power. It is an energy, a mana that goes beyond the objects exchanged, because it is the true reason for the exchange.
Going beyond Mauss and, perhaps, Polanyi, we can ask ourselves if the fact that this force goes beyond the objects exchanged is true only of ‘normal’ societies or whether it is true of modern capitalist society as well; if it is not possible, in other words, that the energy continues to operate in the sense of a transcending of the value of goods as such as well, in the form of a symbolic investment – as in the case of status symbols, for example. Such goods appear as a form of a social glue, i.e., as a paradoxical function of belonging and so as a type of stabilisation. But this is a difficult subject that it is not possible to discuss in depth here. Let us not forget, however, that for Mauss the first and fundamental ‘unproductive’ and ‘obligating’ exchange is, in all cultures without distinction, that with the gods and dead spirits. Thus, the anti-utilitarian dimension of the ‘excess’ remains the explicatory key of that event which we call ‘society’.
This theme has been developed in an original manner within the Collège de Sociologie in the programme for a ‘sacred sociology’. With this expression, Bataille and Caillois do not mean a religious sociology. The ‘sacred’ is understood, rather, in the rigorous sense of the term introduced by Bataille in an illuminating intervention at the seminars of the Collège and then by Caillois in L’homme et le sacré.11 The ‘sacred character’ is specific to ‘everything in human existence that is communifying’.12 Furthermore, the ‘sociological’ perspective which is able to detect in society something more and other than the sum of the individuals that constitute it can be termed ‘sacred’. If we maintain that society cannot be reduced to the summation or mere assembling of the presumed individual atoms that compose it, then we are in the area of the sacred. The problem of the nature of the energy constitutive of the social bond has already been posed. Let us, however, read Bataille’s definition in its entirety:
[T]he question of the nature of society is inherent to any social science and particularly to the domain that we have designated by the name of sacred sociology. It would be impossible, therefore, and futile at the same time, to try to evade this question. Indeed, for us sacred sociology is not just a part of sociology as is, for example, religious sociology, with which it risks confusion. Sacred sociology may be considered the study not only of religious institutions but of the entire communifying movement of society. Hence, it regards power and the army, among other things, as its rightful object, and it contemplates all human activities – sciences, arts, and technology – insofar as they have a communifying value, in the active sense of the word, that is to say, insofar as they are the creators of unity.13
Whereas ‘the whole present-day culture’ goes no further than to ‘add contracts to individuals’, the perspective envisioned by sacred sociology identifies, instead, ‘in addition to the individuals who make up society … an overall movement that transforms nature’. Hence, we can understand the interest of thinkers such as Bataille and Caillois for those ‘diagonal sciences’ characterised by the ability to cross from one discipline to another, which would later be privileged by Polanyi. These sciences provide us with the key to the phenomenon of ‘society’. The constitutive dynamic of the social is supported by an elementary yet latent structure that is not detectable empirically; by a symbolic energy whose excess of meaning is never entirely translatable in a system of meanings. To conclude: the symbolic dynamic that holds society together is never entirely translatable by a ‘structure’, although it fertilises and nourishes all the systems of rules and signs.
According to the socio-anthropological line of thought of Mauss-Polanyi-Sahlins, one need not start from rationality (and the different models of rationality of the agents) to explain society, as do Weber and methodological individualists who, thereby, submit to the hegemony of the economic that characterises the major schools in the social sciences of the 1800s and 1900s. The idea of society as the product of rational projects and actions does not explain the total social fact, but pretends to resolve it in a knotted web [rete di intrecci] of diverse intentionalities (whether strategic or cooperative, communicative or conflictual). Rather, to explain society one must set out from normativity, a latent, pre-reflexive normativity that regulates not only the processes of collective symbolic identification but also those of individual self-identification. In this regard one should recall that Mauss introduces into his work the question of the relationship between personal unconscious and collective unconscious. In this way he anticipates the theme of the instability of the borders between normality and madness, and in this manner, turns the latter into a dependent variable of the forms of institutionalisation of the ‘normal’.
Before we conclude, I should like to take up again – in the light of what we have spoken of so far – the comparison between Weber and Polanyi. Whereas Weber privileges the perspective of rationality and Polanyi that of normativity, I do not believe that their conceptions are necessarily alternatives or exclusive of one another. Instead, they represent two sides of the same problem: that of how we understand the phenomenon of ‘society’. The social dynamic is not only founded upon normativity but on projects as well. Therefore, normative and rational represent the two sides of the same coin of social integration. Those who emphasise the normative tend to privilege the element of binding and underestimate the element of conflict. Conversely, those who emphasise the rational tend instead to privilege the moment of conflict in terms of the competition between individuals, not realising that the same conflict – precisely insofar as it involves the recognition of the contending parties – presupposes a ‘communifying movement’14 anteceding all covenants (i.e., all conventions and contracts). In short, we could say that while Weber speaks of us, Polanyi speaks of the world, of reality or of the contexts in which we live and reproduce our symbolic – even more important than material – conditions of existence. Weber speaks of the way that the forms assumed by our projects and our everyday behaviours have been constituted in the course of centuries, through the phases of the evolution of Western rationalism. Polanyi refers to the great anthropological roots that nourish the different socioeconomic systems, showing how the constitution of modern subjects and their behaviours stem not from a ‘universal’ standard but from an exception.
Weber would have shared this concept of the exception, insofar as he considered the paradox of Western universalism as a singularity that stretches over the world in a single form: the technical rationalisation of the forms of domination. The Occident is universal because it dominates by unifying; because it realises the universal in its very etymology. It casts everything into a single place, universum, as into a basket or bin. The Occident knows only one modality of the universal: that of domination. This domination has its root in a particular declension of rationality, which is even more central than the logic of power. Certainly, ‘ships and cannons’ also play their part, but the most effective armament that the Occident has been able to rely upon over the centuries has been without question its particular form of ‘rationalism’. This depends – aside from technology and the economy – on the emergence of specific forms of ‘practical-rational behaviours’ that have no adequate parallels in other cultures. Even Weber would have had no difficulty in admitting that the behavioural attitudes of individuals from the modern Occident are not really universal but are, rather, the product of an exception that tends to project itself outside its place of birth, expanding across the entire world. But, in contrast to Polanyi, he would never have relegated that exceptionalism to industrialism, which he defined as ‘a precariously grafted scion upon man’s age-long existence’.15
The phrase just quoted is drawn from the already mentioned article ‘Our Obsolete Market Mentality’, in which we had already discovered a significant anticipation of the environmentalist thematic. The problem, for Polanyi, is that of adapting the artifices of technology to the needs of human existence. Studying what precedes industrialism is the only means for anticipating and comprehending the framework destined to follow it, although Polanyi’s prognosis is not at all optimistic:
Our condition can be described in these terms: Industrial civilization may yet undo man. But since the venture of a progressively artificial environment cannot, will not, and indeed, should not, be voluntarily discarded, the task of adapting life in such a surrounding to the requirements of human existence must be resolved if man is to continue on earth. No one can foretell whether such an adjustment is possible, or whether man must perish in the attempt. Hence the dark undertone of concern.16
If we want to glimpse the future that awaits us, we will have to study what has already happened, retracing the stages and the constitutive moments. Polanyi’s observation, formulated while keeping in view what precedes and what – presumably – will follow industrialism/isation, appears fruitful even with respect to the development of the modern state and its current dissolution. In my book Dopo il Leviatano, I attempted an analogous operation on the basis of the hypothesis that, in order to outline the possible contours of what awaits us after the state, one must reconstruct phase by phase, piece by piece, the history of its formation. The wager consists in conceiving the process of destructuring of the Leviathan like a film played backwards. As if the crisis of the Leviathan state could return in inverse order the bricks from which it was built: indirect powers, the corporations that have determined and structured it, the various ingredients of which its legal form and constitutional framework is made.
It is this that I believe constitutes the relevance of Polanyi today. Studying the before is useful to understand the afterwards, to understand the outlines of the global world that is being formed before our eyes. It is a world that we cannot view with the eyes of Robinson Crusoe or with those of Descartes. It is a world that, beyond the appearances and the ideological illusions à la Fukuyama, appears increasingly resistant to our ‘obsolete market mentality’. It is a world that appears to escape the equations of modern universalism precisely because it is characterised by the paradox of the glocal: of a globalisation destined to increasingly flip into a new process of localisation (or – as often described in the unconsciously ethnocentric quality of our everyday language – of ‘retribalisation’). To grasp the discontinuity of this world in relation to the ‘first modernity’, we will need to found a new comparativism – as Amartya Sen has, to some extent, already begun to do. This comparativism will need to take up Weber’s great plan of a comparison between ethico-religious codes and economic behaviour. But it will also have to integrate it and correct it by accounting for a dynamic that is progressively uprooting the Occident from its hegemonic pedestal, shifting the centre of gravity of the world economy towards geocultural areas – such as China, India and South-East Asia – that traditionally shape cultural alterities that are irreducible to the table of values of modern individualism.
The centre of gravitation of theoretical interest shifts from the hendiadys or, rather, from the dichotomous tautology of state and market, to the nexus – and field of forces – of technology and values, economy and ethics. This is the simple but decisive reason for the current relevance of Polanyi’s work of reconstruction of the concept of ‘social philosophy’, following the important efforts of the interwar period (that of the Parisian Collège de Sociologie and of the Frankfurt School). This contemporary relevance of his work asserts itself despite, or perhaps precisely in virtue of, the aporiae and limits that we have indicated.
After all, are we really so sure that the global era in which we happen to live does not represent a new, dramatic but fascinating chapter of the ‘great transformation’?
1George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism, p. xvi.
2Incidentally, at the start of The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Soros announces that he has reread Polanyi’s The Great Transformation.
3Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies.
4Ibid., p. 134.
5Translator’s note: translated in English as the ‘Preface’ to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
6Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1.
7Ernst Cassirer, ‘Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften’.
8Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, p. ix.
9Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
10Carl Schmitt, ‘Die Tyrannei der Werte’.
11Roger Caillois, Man and the Sacred.
12Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois, ‘Sacred Sociology and the Relationships between “Society”, “Organism”, and “Being”‘, p. 74.
13Ibid.
14Ibid.
15Polanyi, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, p. 60.
16Ibid.