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Anthony Brewer wrote: 
> 
> About Polanyi's Great Transformation 
> 
> Is there agreement that (a) markets of some sort go back at least to 
> the earliest written documents, and almost certainly much further and 
> (b) there has never been a system in which unregulated, perfectly 
> competitive, markets accounted for all economic activities? If so, we 
> have to be talking about what forces predominated in which societies at 
> which dates. It is not at all clear that this is a matter of fact. It 
> is a question about what sort of analysis we find most illuminating. 
> That may depend on the question we are asking. Does it really make any 
> sense to characterize all societies as either on side or the other of a 
> simple dividing line - market or embedded? 
 
And more -- how helpful is it the focus on that as the major characteristic 
of the society?  What information are we now going to get that we don't 
have already?  And -- here is what I fear -- is there an inevitable 
apathy that flows from this analysis -- if Polanyi's own solution 
involved the mid-twentieth-century democratic social government ideal, 
and we have found that solution inadequate for many reasons -- what is 
there left?  Should we wonder why students are either apathetic or 
cynical? 
 
> That said, can I bring a bit of the history of economic ideas into the 
> discussion (on the HES list!)? Hume and Smith would have agreed with 
> Polanyi, to a degree. [rest snipped] 
 
Of course they would have.  Because they believed in history as a series 
of fixed stages -- something I already knew from studying historiography, 
but had never really THOUGHT of in terms of economic theory until reading 
an article on the subject in an early HOPE issue (I'll find the citation 
later, but maybe someone knows it) (Drew McCoy also makes good use of it 
in his analyhsis of Jeffersonianism) -- the degree to which this belief 
in fixed stages was embedded in all intellectual theories from the 
eighteenth into the twentieth centuries -- 
 
I knew that a belief in fixed stages of history went with simple 
positivist analysis; that it was derived in part from the efforts 
of westerners to understand other cultures in a way that satisfied 
their own beliefs about themselves. 
 
As a historian, I was trained that concepts of "fixed stages" were 
behind us, that we had to have respect for the period of history 
as it was, that nothing inevitably led to anything else -- one 
had to watch out for historicism, for the fallacy of ex hoc ergo 
proctor hoc, etc. etc. 
 
Why should we be surprised if Smith and Hume (and Ricardo and 
Marx) and Polanyi believed in fixed stages of history -- even if they 
characterized them differently?  But don't we also know that leads 
inevitably to beliefs in western progressivism vs. other cultures 
-- Eurocentricism, racism, sexism ... -- linearity ... 
 
The story runs, of course, from less to more -- always from 
less to more.  Those with other philosophies, other futures, 
other histories, other possibilities -- don't matter because 
eventually they will be subsumed.  What is "important" becomes 
what it is that capitalists or entrepreneurs did. 
 
We are left inevitably obsessed with ... inevitability. 
 
History of economic thought is immensely valuable as intellectual 
history -- but here we run straight into Eurocentrism -- where is 
Africa, where is Asia -- is there nothing more to learn than the 
degree of market-embeddedness?   when suddenly we discover other 
peoples doing the same things, THEN they become important, but only 
important insofar as they are also LIKE Europeans. 
 
We have no framework with which to look at multiple cultures and 
multiple economies and multiple theories of political economy -- 
just LOOK at them, LISTEN to them, THINK about them -- because 
we are so busy cramming them into the inevitable progression 
from lessness to moreness. 
 
Worse yet that it is all expressed in writing.  We also run into 
what is called in the learning disability literature 
"the sequential tyranny of print."  It is so hard to avoid 
sequential reasoning in these theories.  A logically leads 
to B logically leads to C logically leads to D, therefore 
A gives us D -- other possibilties?  multiple outcomes? 
feedbacks? 
 
With much of the literature ABOUT socioeconomic issues in history, 
I find little as satisfying or sophisticated as the applied models 
in urban economics or economic geography or labor economics or 
information economics. 
 
Polanyi was trying to BREAK THROUGH and beyond this type of 
reasoning.  To show respect for what he had learned in other 
cultures.  But that's now what we have learned from his work, is it? 
 
We KNOW already about alienation.  We KNOW already about the 
difference between going to your own doctor and having your own 
choice of specialists and going to a bottomline HMO, don't we? 
That's it -- that's it in a nutshell.  We know -- at least in my 
communiity of people who are very ill -- WE know what it means 
to be invisible because society let's you be invisible and wants 
you to be invisible  ... 
 
So what?  We know about it, now so what? 
 
Are these things the products of markets or bigness?  Is the 
partitioning of life into children over here and guys with the 
income to pay Big Bucks for playoff games over there -- the 
physical spatial separation of our daily lives -- is that the 
market?  Alone?  Is it inevitable? 
 
At what point do we step back and say, what does a successful 
society look like?  What does a successful economy look like? 
We can't do that -- because whatever we say has to fit in those 
neat little conceptual boxes of market solution or non-market 
solution, and the determination of which is which is out of our 
hands, isn't it?  Is it? 
 
And differentness.  When can we learn about differentness without 
having to decide which one is best, is supreme, is the Way To Follow 
or the Way That Will Win Out or The Way That Will Destroy Us? 
 
Much talk about postmodernism -- to me postmodernism is to be able 
to sit back, for now, and LEARN.  so much to learn.  Learn about 
the peoples and cultures and beliefs and ideas and ways of doing 
things and goals and values that were all declared "unimportant" 
because they did not pertain to the story of the all-conquering 
market. 
 
Not to say you can't use the tools of economic theory or sociological 
theories etc. etc. -- just that we need to be back in a stage of 
figuring out WHAT was going on, because we have to find a new way 
of understanding what IS going on.  Because we need to be thinking 
about new ways to look at the possible.  Surrounded too much in the 
academy by the voice of the impossible. 
 
The inside the market/outside the market model helps in analyzing 
certain things -- but only certain things.  I think it was a great 
help, as part of a larger movement, in opening the academy up to 
respect for the study of other people and their ways. 
 
But these stories always move in one direction (in the Coast- 
Chandler story of big business replacing the market, then we 
move toward greater bureaucracy and a different kind of alienation, 
facelessness, personal powerlessness). 
 
At its worse, you get serious research papers arguing the slavery was 
somehow "better" than wage labor because it was face-to-face and 
traditional (I'm not kidding).  (I think e.p. would whirl in his 
grave at the thought.) 
 
At its best, we are left with no answers.  Marx's answer of the 
Proletariat Revolution?  Anybody here believe that?  How about 
Polanyi's solution of Big Government, the hope of the mid-1900s? 
Friedman's market uber allus?  We headed there?  Ya think? 
 
It's not that we don't know how to get from A to B -- we have lost 
all sense of what B could or should be! 
 
If there are no fixed stages of history, then ... what is change? 
what does change mean? 
 
Is there anything in this debate that could allow us to move to 
someplace else?  To answer contemporary problems? 
 
The strength of the inside/outside market debate lay, I believe, 
in the emphasis on the ultimate human-ness of all activity.  Which 
is ultimately a moral value.  But when it can be transformed into 
the argument that the most inhumane of all institutions, New World 
Slavery, slavery in perpetuity, was "better" than "wage labor" 
a priori, we've really hit a limit, haven't we? 
 
Polanyi, I think, was trying to suggest that we lose the fear of 
learning from other cultures -- lose the fear that non-market 
theories were "communistic" and therefore "totalitarian", lose 
the fear that non-Marxist theories were "capitalistic" and 
therefore "exploitative".  Lose the fear of venturing into 
other ideas because of what the ideas are NOT, instead of what 
they might be. 
 
There is so much to learn from!  It is such a pity that Polanyi has 
been used instead to designate certain areas off-limits; used to 
continue to over-emphasize the "determinants of the market economy"; 
the European path; "modernization" for better or worse. 
 
We need to learn about change and how it happens -- about organization 
and reorganization, about different configurations of institutions, 
geography, goals, power, social arrangements, IDEAS ... 
 
Or else -- why bother? 
 
I live in a different world now than when I was able to work on 
my research -- you know, it's been two and a half, almost three 
years! -- I live among people who lost their jobs and their health 
insurance to this stupid illness, who are dependent upon HMOs who 
in turn refuse to recognize the illness -- I live in a world where 
suicide is a constant companion and threat.  The good news is 
chronic fatigue syndrome won't kill you.  the bad news is it won't 
kill you.  Brain lesions, pain, indescribable weakness, significant 
cognitive dysfunction, for how long?  Who knows? 
 
Current research demonstrates that the BEST case scenario - the BEST 
case scenario -- is that you will be back to work in two years. 
Yet the long-term disability companies are moving to insert in their 
contracts that "chronic fatigue" conditions be limited in coverage 
to two years.  What does a disabled person do -- if you are truely 
disabled, you really cannot work.  This is not a joke.  It is not a 
vacation.  It is not funny.  What do you do? 
 
I can use the theories of academia to analyze WHY this is the case. 
 
But what is there in your theories that can HELP my people?  What can 
you offer me, whether of Polanyi or Coase or Marx or Friedman -- that 
will CHANGE anything for my people?  Who cares that we are abandoned 
because no one is left within the community to care for invalids, and 
that it is a logical result of the current configuration of economic 
and social values?  I want to know how I can CHANGE that.  What can you 
tell me that will prevent more suicides? 
 
What good are your theories for my people who are suffering? 
 
Mary Schweitzer, Assoc. Prof., Dept. of History, Villanova 
(on indefinite medical leave since January 1995) 
Co-chair, WECAN, Inc. (Worldwide Electronic CFIDS/M.E. Action 
Network) 
URL:  http://www2.netcom.com/~schweit2/home.htm 
 
 
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