Dear Professor Kennedy,

Yes, I think you're right that any human relation involves dickering.  
And I am certainly willing to join in most criticisms of Polanyi (though 
not all of them).  It's a good point that calculation and balancing and 
questioning is involved at all levels, which is I think another 
difference between humans and our less close cousins (great apes do a 
lot of dickering).  Who's in, who's out?  Let's talk about it.  How much 
fealty is a lord owed?  Let's talk about it.  Talk, talk.  Fiske allows 
for this in his amazing table on pp. 42-49 of the book (rather similar 
to another amazing production by Irene van Staveren in her The Values of 
Economics) by speaking of "some of the features that the cultural 
implementation rules must specify" (p. 46) in the form of questions: "In 
what doman may authority [ranking] be exercised?"

But I wouldn't want your point to obscure a felt difference between the 
most sacred of relations (in/out; this mother's daughter or not; Clan of 
the Cave Bear or not) and the most profane ("WalMart has this 
cheaper").  Trade is normally felt by humans to be less sacred than the 
three other relations.

Now that is something that economics has skirted since Smith, and 
including Smith.  Down through Keynes the sacred got some 
acknowledgement, if only of a sneer.  (Marshall, who did not sneer, was 
after all a failed priest, so to speak: he went up to Cambridge 
intending a clerical career, and as Keynes points out lost his faith 
when many other English intellectuals did, in the 1860s; yet there is a 
whiff of incense, as it were, in some of  Marshall's writings (I mean 
Industry and Trade, not his memorandum on trade offer curves!).  After 
Keynes---that is after and including Samuelson---the sacred got absorbed 
into "taste" and the adventures of that unattractive, and prudence-only, 
character, Mr. Max U.

Sincerely,

Deirdre McCloskey