======================= HES POSTING ================= As a personal testimonial, Polanyi's Great Transformation was my passport to another world, a crucial vehicle out of the theoreticist training at the core of a US PhD program. For me the sustaining lesson is less the dominant motif (the `great transformation') but the background to the argument - the concept of the `social fabric' of economic society. If anything, Polanyi's treatment of market society is impoverished (he makes too many concessions to the concept of `self-regulation' of the market), but his accessible book has nourished later toilers. The most pressing issue for economists would appear to be not the importance of the `market' in pre-market economies but the importance of the market in so-called market economies - the social fabric of the market economy, or what economic anthropologists call, in their excruciating conceptualisations and prose, `embeddedness'. The problem can be simply grasped by confronting that the concept `the market' is an inadequate descriptor. We need to put flesh on it. (One of the desirable by-products is a feeling for `comparative capitalisms', so that we as economists aren't bound to try to explain the Japanese (etc) success in terms of differential levels of economic variables (savings ratios, size of government, etc)). Some examples? John Lie's article in Politics and Society 21,3,1993 (The Social Origins of Market Society in England) is a useful vehicle for confronting the different social structures and balance of forces around different market forms. The debate, centred on New Left Review, on whether Britain ever became truly `capitalist', is another useful vehicle for getting away from ideal type abstractions to flesh and blood historically existing capitalist economies. For Americans, for which there is substantial propaganda apparatus trumpeting a purist market model (Australians are subject to such propaganda on a daily basis), the role of not merely the military industrial complex but the military itself in influencing the character, location and timing of industrial development provides a nice little antithesis to any notions of purism (vide Ann Markusen et al, The Rise of the Gunbelt). As for wage labour, labour history and labour law (vide Atleson's Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law, Forbath's Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, etc) are more instructive on the complex and continuous shaping of the character of wage labour than any grand abstractions as to `commodification'. etc. etc. >From this perspective, the whole corpus of neoclassical economics (the Walrasian strand in particular) is a diversion from the main game. But Marshall is also heavily to blame, and his institutional victory over the Historical School (Cunningham in particular) was a victory for entombing Polanyi-type perspectives and keeping fresh impressionable young minds from being exposed to such dangerous ideas. The lessons from Polanyi are not that the post-'Transformation' economy can thankfully be analysed purist terms, least of all in general equilibrium terms. The lessons are in analysing how the market economy is socially/politically/culturally/ embedded; in particular, that history is not the gradual but inevitable triumph of market rationality over `excrescences'. What economists from Smith downwards want to see as aberrations aren't going to go away (a good example being the persistence of divergences from the so-called `free trade' ideal) and they need to be analysed as something other than the dead hand of the past. Fortunately, the history of economic thought encompasses more than the history of economic theory. This debate on Polanyi is far more instructive than multiple years of the core syllabus of English-language economics, and the earlier one's students get exposed to such stuff the better. One contribution to the specific debate: I don't know why Anthony Brewer is so antagonistic to the `conscious transformation of institutions'. It's a losing argument. The historical record is replete with pervasive and assertive (and substantially successful) strategic interventions and counter-interventions, which blend organically with the `unconscious' dimension of structural evolution. History does not happen purely by stealth. Evan Jones Economics, Sydney University ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]