Reviews of the Book
“Keith Hart’s book is terrific. Ours is a complacent
age, and it is a pleasure to find someone thinking hard about society and
its most important institution, which is money. Keith Hart writes clearly
and with astonishing good humour. He believes that the virtues of money can
be preserved and the injustices of money abolished. I’m not sure about that,
but I am sure it is worth investigating.”
James Buchan, novelist and
author of Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money
“This book is that rare thing, a genuinely revolutionary
and radical way of rethinking money and society.”
Andrew Marr, former editor of The Independent
and author of The Day That Britain Died, also a major BBC television
series
“Keith Hart, who developed the concept of the informal
economy and first perceived third world migration as the formation of translocal
societies, now offers you markets without capitalism, money without exploitation
and exchange without inequality, all on the basis of the internet as world
community. Well, you gotta read that.”
Marshall Sahlins, Charles F. Grey Professor
of Anthropology Emeritus, University of Chicago
“The more I think about the book, the more important
it becomes. Why? Because anthropology is in such a mess. Tell me who in anthropology
is dealing with real current economic processes? So this work is critical
because it could bring the subject back on track again.”
Don Robotham, Professor of Anthropology,
City University of New York
Review in Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute
March 2001
Keith Hart, THE MEMORY BANK : Money in an Unequal World
London: Profile Books 2000 340pp
isbn 1 86197 208 3
Hart has written an exemplary book which has the timely effect
of reminding anthropologists of some increasingly neglected tenets about why
Anthropology should be an important discipline. It reflects the level of ambition
that ought to be intrinsic to a subject that sets itself the task of carrying
out the comparative study of humanity. For Hart the advantage of such studies
is that they allow us to envisage other worlds and consider how humanity can
come to be at home in such worlds.
Hart’s breadth of vision takes in a much wider sweep of history
than is usual. On the one hand he looks backwards to our roots (and for much
of humanity a continued immersion) within agrarian systems. These continue
to influence and constrain us through institutions whose earlier purposes
and origins we tend to forget. Much of the book is devoted to historical research
on the development of capitalism which here is not some catchall term but
a series of diverse alignments of economic and wider practices. But the primary
focus of the book is on the future and the sense that recent developments
in communications, most especially the Internet, have demonstrated that formations
we took as established are being shifted with surprising rapidity and so the
consideration of prior diversity ought to be the foundation for a self-conscious
appraisal of some possible futures.
This is a time when many intellectuals have seen almost an
end of history with the hegemony of what Hart calls virtual capitalism where
money mainly makes money bolstered by a rigid system of sovereign states that
both secured the stability of and took their authority from their control
over monetary systems. By contrast, from the perspective of Hart’s longue
duree these – but also much of what was becoming associated with them such
as wage labour, or the separation of work from the domestic – represent a
relatively short period of ascendancy which has already irretrievably broken
down. Hart is genuinely excited by these shifting sands that might leave other
academics queasy. When the Euro is in the middle of three years of virtual
existence without a currency, and Internet trading is both global and extremely
difficult to capture within national systems of taxation, Hart sees an opportunity
to consider the liberatory possibilities in both markets and money that have
been hidden by state hegemony.
Central to Hart re-imagining of the world is money itself.
Characteristically he celebrates rather than tries to reduce the plurality
of theories of money, while excavating the ideological stance behind several
such theories. He uses his primary sources of Locke and Keynes, both of whom
appear in unusually clear and forceful guise here, to demonstrate the centrality
of money itself to the wider formations of society and states. But his own
approach, given in his title, is a subtle rendition of money as the trace
of memory of social interactions, a conception at the other end of the spectrum
from simplistic groundings in mere currency. This is a vision of money as
a communicative media that fits well with the rise of information itself as
the core to the modern economy. With the break up of money as the central
foundation for states, he envisages in a rather utopian final chapter a re-subjectified
use of personalised money whose precedent lies both in the emergence of small
scale systems of community exchange but also in the potential of the large
scale plastic and digitised monies that are developing today. Think person
cards on analogy with store cards.
The book is written in an engaging fast paced style, full
of unusual and provocative interpretations that stir up stale and sedimented
portraits. For example, the Mauss that Hart draws out as concerned with the
libertarian potential of the market bears almost no relation to the conventional
anthropological caricature. He also manages the difficult trick of understanding
figures such as Locke and Polanyi within their particular historical circumstance
and yet thereby enhancing rather than reducing their contemporary relevance.
Hart gives anthropology its due and that of itself is sobering.
Comparative case-studies help relativise our perspective on money and markets,
while simple dualisms of embedded others and disembedded capitalism are attacked.
But within an interdisciplinary work that uses disciplines intermittently
for their contribution to the arguments of the whole, anthropological examples
have to jostle for their appropriate slots amidst historical, philosophical
and many other sources of discussion. This is not stated as such but one can
sense the author’s frustration that the dominance of highly parochial studies
open only to debates within the discipline, prevents him from giving anthropological
work the prominence he would have aspired to as a contribution to his struggle
with the central dialectical tensions of the modern world.
A surprise for me is the constant emphasis on money itself,
without any mention of the consumption of that which is purchased with money
as the primary candidate and agency for re-subjectifying the economy. Also
I am probably not alone in rejecting the central ethos of liberalism that
underlines this book and seeing the decline of bureaucratic taxation and the
rise of personalised systems of exchange as more likely to extend rather than
lesson social and financial inequality. But this is one of those cases where
whether one agrees with the arguments or not is rather less important than
whether Hart helps one envisage possible causes, consequences and connections
one had not previously imagined or considered.. On those criteria The Memory
Bank is an immensely rewarding and significant volume.
Daniel Miller
