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
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