================== HES POSTING ====================
Ah my, if the discussion is going to die down I better get my two
cents in. Unfortunately, my illness precludes reading much of the
previous posts (still disabled with chronic fatigue syndrome -- the
DD, or d----ed disease, we call it) -- but from past debates:
First, no doubting the significance of Polyani's "Great Transformation"
in terms of its impact upon historians, sociologists, and anthropologists.
But ... you eventually end up with a simple dichotomy -- the market
and the non-market, and that is just not sophisticated enough to
analyze important issues either in the past or the present.
As a deductive theory, it leads to analysis by classification rather
than by observation or logic. That is, first we figure out whether
we are dealing with a "market" society or a "nonmarket" society,
and then everything else flows from that one decision point.
Or, conversely, the search is on for a particular marker (such as
the use of "cash") that will "prove" we have found a "market" society
(rather like HIV is a "marker" for the later development of AIDS).
Find the marker, then we know which side of the dichotomy we're on
and can just assume the rest.
Other types of power or interpersonal relationships or
institutional complexities fall by the wayside as we focus on this
single dichotomy, single point of inflection.
Inter-cultural analysis too easily becomes one series of euphamisms
for "developed" and "nondeveloped" (or market and traditional or
western and nonwestern or ...) after another.
Historical analysis is reduced to "before" and "after", to "acceptance"
and "resistance" and to an inevitable perception of history as
a linear timeline -- depending on one's tastes -- either progressive
or regressive.
The irony is that, at the time he wrote, I believe Polanyi was trying
to escape the dichotomous political language of the mid-1900s. But
that language itself pervades his writing, and, unfortunately, most
of the uses of his theories.
The question for today is not whether Polanyi was "right" or "wrong",
nor is it whether he was influention (unequivocably YES, he was
influential) -- but whether the forms of analysis generated by his
work has played out its usefulness for now, and those seeking energetic
interpretations should search elsewhere.
To the extent this is directed at economists, I would argue: look at
what Polanyi had to offer non-economists that was missing from the economic
interpretations available to them from economics itself. To historians I
would say, time to move on from the "market vs. nonmarket" dichotomy. The
tools for both already exist in both disciplines.
Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova University
(on medical leave since January 1995)
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