2011/12 is the political consequence of the financial crisis of 2007/8. There is still a tendency to see the crisis in economic rather than political terms. In this respect, neoliberalism’s detractors often reproduce the free market ideology they claim to oppose. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today. One way of approaching our moment in history is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.

As a partial antidote to the daily news, I find it useful to attempt a historical periodization of the last two centuries or more, mainly to indicate that the present rupture in history opens up the prospect of several decades of turbulence.

1776-1815            An age of war and revolutions

1815-1848            The industrial revolution

1848-1873            Origins of national capitalism

1873-1914            First age of financial globalization

1914-1945            The second thirty years war

1945-1979            Les trente glorieuses of social democracy

1979-2008            Second age of financial globalization

2008-                     Another age of war and revolutions?

My aim is not to predict the inevitably dire outcome of the present global crisis, but to invite public debate at a more serious level that may help us to avoid such an outcome.

“National capitalism” is the synthesis of nation-states and industrial capitalism. Its main symbol has been national monopoly currency (legal tender or central bank money). It is the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of national citizens. Its origins lay in a series of linked revolutions of the 1860s/early 70s based on a new alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class.

Governments then combined with large corporations to launch a bureaucratic revolution and mass production in the late 19^th century. The national system became general after the First World War when states turned inward to manage their economies in war and depression. Its apogee was the social democracy built after 1945; but it has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971, a new regime of floating currencies emerged and money derivatives were invented in 1972.

Money expands the capacity of individuals to stabilise their own personal identity by holding something durable that embodies the desires and wealth of all the other members of society.  Its chief function is remembering (Hart 2000). People learn to understand each other as members of communities and money is an important vehicle for this. They share meanings as a way of achieving their practical purposes together.

Nation-states have been so successful in a relatively short time that it is hard to imagine society in any other way. I identify here five ideal-types of community all represented by the nation-state:

•  political community: a link to the world and a source of law at home
•  community of place: territorial boundaries of land and sea
•  imagined or virtual community: the constructed cultural identity of citizens
•  community of interest: subjectively and objectively shared purposes in trade and war
•  monetary community: common use of a national monopoly currency

The rise and fall of single currencies is one way of approaching national capitalism’s historical trajectory.

In my article on “heads or tails” (Hart 1986), I argued, following Polanyi (1944), that money is both a token of state authority and a commodity made by markets, at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons.  States and markets are combined in national capitalism, but policy swings erratically between the two extremes. David Graeber (2011) has made a similar contrast between money as virtual credit and as currency or bullion to analyse the history of debt over the last five millennia.

Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal (Hart 2009). According to Georg Simmel (1900), it is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society. But we will first have to get past national capitalism as the twentieth’s century’s dominant social form.

In The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi listed money as a “fictitious commodity” whose exchange in the free market came close to buying and selling society itself. He held that money and markets originate in the effort to extend society beyond its local core; society has to become more inclusive since none is self-sufficient. “Token money” facilitates domestic trade, “commodity money” foreign trade; but conflict between internal and external dimensions often disrupts economy.

In a later article, “Money objects and money uses” (1964), he approached money as a semantic system, like writing. Only modern money combines the four functions of payment, standard, store and exchange in a limited number of “all-purpose” symbols. (This is not the same as “general-purpose money” which just means money can buy anything.) Primitive and archaic forms attached the separate uses to different symbolic objects or “special-purpose” monies.  Polanyi argued against the primacy of money as a medium of exchange and for a multi-stranded model of its evolution.  It is basically a means of payment or “purchasing power”.

Although this analysis was intended only to illuminate the history of money, Polanyi’s approach offers remarkable insight into the global economic crisis today. Our challenge is to conceive of society as plural rather than singular, as a federated network rather than as a centralized hierarchy, the nation-state. The era of national monopoly currencies is very recent (from the 1850s) and “all-purpose money” has been breaking up for four decades now, since the US dollar went off gold in 1971 (Gregory 1997).

World economy has reverted since the break-up of the Bretton Woods system of fixed parity exchange rates to the plural pattern of competing currencies that was normal before the modern era. The crisis was precipitated by the creation of an offshore banking system which brought the informal economy to the heart of global finance (Shaxson 2011). It was also significantly a result of a separation of functions between different types of monetary instruments. Central bank control was eroded by a shift to money being issued in many forms by a global distributed network of corporations, not just governments and banks.

The digital revolution in communications has been transforming money and exchange for two decades now (Hart 2000). Radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information introduces new conditions for engagement with the impersonal economy. The formation of world society is driven by money, markets and telecommunications.

This process of social extension beyond national boundaries is fraught with danger, much as the kula ring was (Malinowski 1922). We need to extend systems of social rights to the global level before the contradictions of the market system collapse into world war. But local political organization resists such a move. This dialectic of globalization is very ancient. Ours is becoming a multi-polar world whose plurality of associations and convergent income distribution resembles the medieval period more than anything since.

This is the context for understanding the monetary crisis that has overwhelmed the eurozone of late. The apparent triumph of the free market at the end of the Cold war in 1989/90 induced two huge political blunders. Radical privatization of Soviet bloc public economies ignored the common history of politics, law and social custom that shored up market economies in the West, thereby delivering the economy to gangsters and tycoons. And the European single currency was supposed to provide the social glue for political union without first developing effective fiscal institutions or economic convergence between North and South.

The big mistake was to replace national currencies with the euro. An alternative, the hard ecu, would have floated politically managed national currencies alongside a low-inflation European central bank currency. Countries that didn’t join the euro, like Britain and Switzerland, have in practice enjoyed the privilege of this plural option. Eurozone countries cannot devalue and so must reduce their debts through deflation or default. The euro came after money was already breaking up into multiple forms and functions. The Americans centralized their currency after a civil war; the Europeans centralized theirs as a means of achieving political union.

If Polanyi’s ghost is haunting us now, so too is Georg Simmel’s. One of money’s anchors, according to him (Simmel 1900), was its physical substance (metals, paper etc). He believed that this would wither away, revealing more clearly money’s functionality (the ends to which it is put and its technical organization). Money’s essence is what people use it for in society. It always introduces a third party to bilateral exchange — the community that shares its use. Virtual money would make that social foundation of money more explicit.

Simmel’s prophecy has been realised to a remarkable degree, as the digital revolution accelerates and cheapens electronic transfers (Dembinski and Perritaz 2000). But if the essence of money is its use in a community with shared social institutions, national capitalism has lost its grip on reality. We must therefore move from singular (national) to plural (federal) conceptions of society. The infrastructure of money has already become decentralized and global. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s or to a Keynesian regime of managed exchange rates and capital flows is bound to fail.

Where are the levers of democratic power to be located, now that globalization has exposed the limitations of national economic management? The cultural logic of national capitalism leads the political classes who got us into this mess to repeat the same mistakes. Politics is a dialogue of the deaf, between those who deny the need for any political regulation of markets and others who remain trapped in the outmoded model of central bank money.

The idea of world society is still perceived by most people as at best a utopian fantasy or at worst a threat to us all. We need to build an infrastructure of money adequate to humanity’s common needs. This agenda seems impossibly remote right now. One move in such a direction goes by the name of “alter-globalization” (Pleyers 2010). The idea of a “human economy“(Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010) offers a bridge to that movement.

“Economy” is putting ones house in order in a world shaped increasingly by markets (Hann and Hart 2011). Social units of widely varying scale may be said to have one. Economy is pulled inwards to secure local guarantees of a community’s rights and interests; and outwards to make good local supply by engaging with outsiders through the medium of money and markets of various sorts, not just our own (Mauss 1925).

The idea of a human economy relies less on abstractions than on what people are doing already, with the aim of imparting a new emphasis, combination and direction to their efforts. A preliminary definition of its assumptions would include the following:

• Aim for a pragmatic economics that people can understand and use
• Economy is made and remade by human beings
• A focus on complex institutional particulars
• A more holistic conception of everyone’s needs and interests
• Address humanity as a whole and the world society we are making

Three things count in our societies  as they are increasingly emancipated from a territorial base — people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money.

To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add in 2011-12 that of political revolution. Revolutions are fed by digital contrasts with what has gone before, but the human economy is built on analogue processes. Europe has become the main focus once more of a world revolution. The euro crisis is a Sophoclean tragedy in which good intentions cannot remedy the consequences of past mistakes. Now if ever a synoptic vision of humanity’s plight is vital, if we are to save ourselves from a disaster that our institutions prevent us from even seeing, never mind avoiding.

References

Dembinski, P. and C. Perritaz 2000. Towards the break-up of money: when reality driven by information technology outshines Simmel’s vision. Foresight 2: 483–97.

Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: the first 5,000 years. New York: Melville House.

Gregory, C. 1997. Savage money: the anthropology and politics of commodity exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood.

Hann, C. and K. Hart 2011. Economic anthropology: history, ethnography, critique. Cambridge: Polity.

Hart, K. 1986. Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin. Man 21: 637–56.

Hart, K. 2000. The memory bank: money in an unequal world. London: Profile; republished as: 2001. Money in an unequal world. New York: Texere.

Hart, K. 2009. Money in the making of world society. In C. Hann and K. Hart (eds) Market and society: The great transformation today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hart, K., J. Laville and A.D. Cattani (eds) 2010. The human economy: a citizen’s guide. Cambridge: Polity.

Malinowski, B. 1961 (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton.

Mauss, M. 1990 (1925) The Gift : Form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London : Routledge.

Pleyers, G. 2010. Alter-globalization: becoming actors in a global world. Cambridge: Polity.

Polanyi, K. 2001 (1944). The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our times. Boston: Beacon.

Polanyi, K. 1977 (1964). Money objects and money uses. In K. Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man. New York: Academic Press.

Shaxson, N. 2011. Treasure Islands: Tax havens and the men who stole the world. London: Bodley Head.

Simmel, G. 1978 (1900). The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge.

I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on social movements, I decided that I should try to insert the perspective on economy I have developed into contemporary political processes and events. I have been writing, editing and researching about alternative approaches to the economy for a long time and blogging about politics more recently, but never the two together. In the last year, as a result of the North African revolutions and then the Occupy movement, I have come to see that the economic and political arguments have to be brought much closer together. Taking our lead from this moment in world history, we need to ask how the work that Jean-Louis and I have long been engaged in – on human economy, économie solidaire, social economy – needs to be modified in order to lend support to what has become a serious political movement at the global level.

I entered our collaboration after Jean-Louis, with Antonio David Cattani, published an expanded version of the Dictionnaire de l’autre économie in 2006. I published an enthusiastic review essay about it. I was staggered by the range of analysis concerning economic and political development that it contained. I have been living in Paris for 15 years and I feel lucky to have been here during what I see as a Renaissance of French economic sociology. The book edited by Philippe Steiner and François Vatin, Traité de sociologie économique, is a testament to the constellation of brilliant economic sociologists that France has produced in the last decade or more. It was equally clear that this work was largely unknown in the English-speaking world and, increasingly under Chirac and Sarkozy, lacked a receptive audience in France as well. So, since my friends in this field were being frozen out of French politics to some extent, we had the idea of selling the project to the English-speakers or at least to those who speak English as a second language. Geoffrey has already introduced the result, The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (2010).

All the predecessor volumes were called, in various languages, Dictionary of the Other Economy. We dropped that particular formulation for reasons that will become the main theme of my talk today. The difference between what are conventionally known as the extreme left and the centre left lies in the concept of change that each of them has. The extreme left conceives of the future as the negation of what it calls “capitalism” in a unitary way and imagines a radical rupture with that system in ways that are not always specified, but are thought to be revolutionary. The centre left, whether it relies on state intervention or the mobilization of voluntary associations of various kinds, tends to emphasize more gradual and continuous developments building on what people are doing already. We felt that labelling our intellectual work as “the other economy” lent itself too readily to radical utopias. Jean-Louis and I based our conversation on what Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi understood by economic change, since we were looking for a more positive construction than a simple negation; and this is where the idea of a human economy came from.

What makes an economy “human”? First, it privileges people before abstractions. People make and remake their economic lives and that has to be the basis for thinking about economy. Any economics has to be accessible to them as a practical guide to how they manage those lives. But the economy is human in another sense too in that we increasingly confront economic problems and dilemmas as humanity. The future of humanity as a whole is at stake in the economic crises that we face and not just the world seen through the blinkers of national politics and media. So the idea of a human economy points in these two directions: towards what people really do and extending our perspectives to a global level, if possible.

Since publishing the book, I have helped to set up a research program on the human economy at the University of Pretoria in South Africa’s capital. UP was an Afrikaner establishment close to government power in the apartheid period; but South Africa is on the move and has been for more than two decades, so the university wants to refurbish its image and expand in more progressive directions. They have generously funded a program of post-doctoral fellowships drawing initially from the global South (with fellows from Latin America and the Caribbean, South Asia and Southern Africa), but now linking researchers from North and South in a creative dialogue focused on South Africa. Volumes before The Human Economy were largely a Francophone and Latin American venture, so we widened the range of contributors to take in 15 countries, adding authors from Britain, North America and Scandinavia, as well as translating a selection from the Dictionnaire. But it soon became apparent that Asia and Africa – where most of the people live – were still missing from this impressively diverse international project. The series was launched in Brazil and Argentina soon after the millennium and it was always intended to advance collaboration between networks of researchers and activists. The books are a digest of existing knowledge and experience that might help to inform readers who wish to change the world in a progressive direction. Ours too did not offer much guidance for how to carry out active research on the human economy. So the Pretoria program aims to fill these two gaps: first, to enrol Africans and Asians, alongside Latin Americans and Europeans, into studying how to make a better economy; and second, to foster post-doctoral research that would help to inform and refine this program.

The Dictionnaire that Jean-Louis put together came out in the middle of the credit boom (2002, 2006). Very few people saw much prospect for economic and political change at that time. By the time we published The Human Economy in 2010, after the financial crisis had broken, it was clear that the ideas it contained should find a more fertile reception in the new climate of public opinion. At the very least, the absolute hegemony of mainstream economics has been damaged by the crisis. It really isn’t feasible to argue any longer – although many economists still do – that the best guarantee of improved human well-being is to leave markets free of political intervention and social control. Surely no-one believes that any more. Markets were never free, but the dominant ideology provided cover for siphoning wealth to the top; and that is now very much on the political agenda. Even the Financial Times publishes articles saying that we maybe need a new synthesis of anthropology, history and economics to replace the old discipline. So we were pretty sure that our ideas would meet a more favourable audience in this context.

Even so, we distanced ourselves, in the introduction and in our approach to editing the book, from any “revolutionary” eschatology that suggested society had reached the end of something rotten and would soon be launched on something quite new. The idea of a human economy rested on drawing attention to the fact that people do a lot more than might be imagined if we focus only on the dominant economic institutions. Against a singular notion of the economy as “capitalism”, we argued that all societies combine a plurality of economic forms and that several of these are universally distributed across history, even if their combination is strongly coloured by the dominant type of organization in particular times and places. For example, in his famous essay on The Gift (1925), Marcel Mauss tried to show that other economic principles were present in capitalist societies and understanding this would provide a sounder basis for building non-capitalist alternatives than the Bolshevik revolution’s attempt to break with markets and money. Karl Polanyi too, in his various writings, insisted that the human economy throughout history was made up of a number of mechanisms of which the market was only one. We argued therefore that the idea of radical transformation of an economy conceived of monolithically as capitalism into something regarded as its opposite was an inappropriate way to approach economic change. We should pay attention to the full range of what people are doing already and build economic initiatives around giving these a new direction, combination and emphasis, rather than suppose that economic change has to be invented from scratch. Although this might seem to be a gradualist approach to economic improvement, adopting such an approach on awide scale would in fact have revolutionary consequences.

I have been working quite closely for 5 or 6 years now with my friend and colleague at Goldsmiths, David Graeber. He is an anarchist who was prominent from the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. His book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is a best-seller. His politics inform his economic analysis; and he has always taken an anti-statist and anti-capitalist position, with markets usually subsumed under the concept of capitalism. That is, he sees the future and the means of getting there as being based on the opposite of our capitalist states. The core of his politics is “direct action” which he has practised and written about as ethnography. I have always been centre-left with a liberal streak, but my mentor, the person from whom I have learned most, was the West Indian revolutionary, C.L.R. James and through him I gained a literary interest in the history of revolutions. In our book, Jean-Louis and I argued that people everywhere rely on a wide range of organizations in their economic lives: markets, nation-states, corporations, cities, voluntary associations, families, virtual networks, informal economies, crime and war. We should be looking for a more progressive mix of these things. We can’t afford to turn our backs on the institutions that have helped us make the modern transition to the world society that humanity now lives in. Large-scale bureaucracies co-exist with varieties of popular self-organization and we have to make them work together rather than at cross-purposes, as they often are now. All of these are responses to the challenges posed by the modern world and we need to combine them at a new and more inclusive level.

David and I agree on much of the economics. As anthropologists, we both claim inspiration from Marx and Mauss in departing from mainstream economics. Our theories of money are pretty close. Although he is less explicitly indebted to Polanyi, he too believes that economic life everywhere may be understood as a plural combination of moral principles – sharing or “communism”, reciprocity and hierarchy – which take on a different complexion when organized by dominant social forms. Thus helping each other as equals is essential to capitalist societies, but capitalism is a terrible way of bringing it out effectively. But at the same time he believes that a radical rupture with the norms of capitalist states is necessary if we are to realise out human potential through a new kind of political economy. At first, I saw our positions as being incompatible, but recent political developments now persuade me otherwise.

I would bet that 2011-2012 will turn out to be a revolutionary moment in world history comparable at least with the changes that took place in 1989-1990 and maybe more significant than that. The trigger for such a perception has been the so-called Arab Spring, the revolutions that deposed dictators in Tunisia and Egypt during early 2011. I am an Africanist and I have written about Tunisia online (e.g. http://thinkafricapress.com/tunisia/elections-2011-economic-democracy-preeminent). Then uprisings followed in Europe (protests in Greece, Los Indignados in Madrid), the student protests and riots in Britain and the student movement in Chile before OWS captured the world’s attention in New York last September. I felt from the beginning that OWS, whatever its consequences for American society and politics and whether or not it could claim some long-term success there, had profound significance for the global movement. It showed that the American monolith was not fixed in stone and that revolts around the world had a counterpart within the US. We live after all in the American Empire and I always thought that the “Arab Spring” should be seen as a revolt against that Empire. Oil has succeeded gold as the world economy’s principal commodity and control of it underlies the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency. The Middle East, Israel and oil are so central to American influence in the world – not to mention the wars they have launched against Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe soon Iran from their bases and fleets there – that the sacking of Mubarak had immense significance in and beyond the region. But at first there was no sign that anything was moving in the US. All you had was the Tea Party and a stalemate in Congress.

CLR James came from Trinidad and died an old man in the late 1980s. He was saying after 1968 that there were only two world revolutions left – the second Russian revolution and the second American revolution. He wrote a book that I co-edited called American Civilization (1993 [1950]) in which he argued that the contradiction between totalitarian bureaucracy and the struggle to bring democracy into people’s lives was at its strongest in the United States. He always believed that American society must be central to any future world revolution. I am not predicting that the OWS movement will lead directly to mass insurrection in the US. But its cultural example was immediately taken up within the country and across the world; and this reflects the fact that we live in a world unified by the contradictions of American imperial power. I watched Tiananmen Square on TV with James in April 1989. He was 88 years old and died a few weeks later. If you recall, the students were protesting because of an international meeting there to which Gorbachev was invited. The whole world was gripped by the spectacle. He said that the Chinese Communist Party would put down this rebellion easily, but “The Russians will find it hard to hold onto Eastern Europe after this”. The Berlin Wall came down six months later and that was the start of what may or may not turn out to have been the second Russian revolution.

All of this led me to reconsider the perspective we adopted in the Human Economy volume. It now seems that the piecemeal reformist approach to economic change we took there needs to confront the world revolution that we may be living through. This morning, while I was contemplating my talk and wondering how I was going to deal with “Human Economy meets the Occupy Movement” for the first time ever, three documents landed in my lap, or rather in my laptop, and I wish to give you a chance to read excerpts from them. One was an article in Harper’s by Nathan Schneider, “Planet Occupy”, on the principles of the Occupy movement (http://harpers.org/archive/2012/01/hbc-90008434); another was by the same author at Waging Non–Violence, “Is Anonymous our future?” (http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/01/is-anonymous-our-future/ ); this in turn was based on one by Gabriella Coleman at Triple Canopy, “Our weirdness is free: the logic of Anonymous–online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice” (http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free). In addition, I am circulating among you something I wrote for a list on Lenin, James and revolution, since the perspective we operate with in normal times doesn’t really apply to revolutionary situations where timing is everything. James has a lecture, ‘Walter Rodney and the question of power’, given to California  students in 1981 http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1981/01/rodney.htm. He draws extensively on a letter written by Lenin in 1917 and later published as ‘Marxism and insurrection’: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/13.htm.

In January 1917, Lenin gave a speech to Swiss socialists in Zurich where he said he did not expect revolution in his lifetime, but he hoped that the younger comrades would be able to fight in one. The Russian revolution got going in March, when the soviets took to the streets; in September, Lenin writes a letter seeking to justify why he called for revolution in September, but had not in July; and by October the revolution was a done deal. You should read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution: it takes 1300 pages to cover nine months and some events like a pivotal meeting in which the author’s intervention was decisive get 40 pages. We are talking about speed-up here. The normal pace of talking, writing and publishing that we worked with in our book can’t accommodate this reality. I don’t want to give all this up to join the barricades. I’m an intellectual who wants to train young people to study and work for economic progress, like this seminar. Nevertheless even this more sedate approach has to distinguish between the time frame of revolutionary insurrection and building a more effective economic platform to help people experience a measure of economic democracy in their lives. These piecemeal long-term projects are vital, but the premise of a revolutionary moment puts pressure on that work.

Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who has been a participant observer in Anonymous’ 4chan chat rooms since 2008. Anonymous is an occult organization of geeks, trolls and agitators who came to prominence in 2011 with attacks on government and corporate websites in defence of Wikileaks and other causes. If you haven’t heard of them, blame it on the French media who would rather that the digital revolution hadn’t happened. This is not all of France which, with Finland, Korea and Japan, is one of the four countries with the fastest and cheapest broadband and supports the largest blogosphere outside the US. Anonymous started out justifying opaque identities as a cloak for freedom of expression which at times meant being disruptive just for the fun of it. But it has since become an engaged force for social justice. There are important parallels between Anonymous and OWS, but their modus operandi is strikingly different in that one is clandestine and the other transparent. This might be thought to be a contradiction if it were not the case that the pursuit of openness as a political virtue requires a degree of closure also. We might want the banks to be more transparent, but which of us would like our own income an dexpenditure to be made public? So the open/closed dialectic may be less polarised than it is sometimes made out to be. The same may be said of freedom and necessity, perhaps also of revolution and reform. You can’t have one without both. Walk on two legs. It’s better than standing on one foot and falling over…

In winding up her argument, Coleman draws on Ernst Bloch, a favourite writer of mine too:

“Anonymous acts in a way that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful of the law, but it also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch calls ‘the principle of hope.’ In his three-volume work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938-47), Bloch attends to a stunningly diverse number of signs, symbols, and artifacts from different historical eras, ranging from dreams to fairy tales, in order to remind us that the desire for a better world is always in our midst. Bloch works as a philosophical archaeologist, excavating forgotten messages in songs, poems, and rituals. They do not represent hope in the religious sense, or even utopia—there is no vision of transcending our institutions, much less history—but they do hold latent possibilities that in certain conditions can be activated and perhaps lead to new political realities. ‘The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope,’ Bloch writes. The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet seems to me an enactment of Bloch’s principle of hope.”

So Bloch’s vision is that this aspiration for a better world is everywhere and inside us, an infrastructure always ready to be tapped into and given more concrete impression. It is similar, at the level of ideology, to what Jean-Louis and I are arguing for the economy – people have always had many different ways of organizing their economic lives and these make up a reservoir of knowledge and aspiration that, given appropriate direction, could lead us to a better economy.

The basic principles of the Occupy movement, as Schneider shows, are quite general and easily understood. One question that immediately comes to mind is how we might account for the similarities between so many movements that sprang up independently or soon after OWS. The Indignados of Madrid predated New York, yet their principles of organization are remarkably alike. Where did these principles come from? Are they an instinctive negation of mainstream political economy? Are they an innate expression of human democracy? Or were they diffused by the new digital media? Perhaps all three or none of these are relevant. Schneider has a good summary which is worth quoting at length:

“The Declaration of the Occupation is addressed not to governments—no hope there—but rather “to the people of the world,” urging communities everywhere to “assert your power.” “We are creating an exemplar society,” states Occupy Boston’s Declaration of Occupation… “No one’s human needs go unmet,” [it] continues. Planet Occupy, like last fall’s occupations, provides food and shelter for everyone, no questions asked. It also ensures health care, mutual education, childcare, legal representation, and a large, meticulously catalogued library. Sounds like a good social democracy—except that, in the words of Occupy Wall Street’s Principles of Solidarity, the basic unit of political life is not the ballot box but ‘autonomous political beings engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy.’ Though they might be wired to the teeth, the political beings of Planet Occupy carry out their democracy face to face, in well-coordinated small groups that operate by consensus. It’s ‘participatory as opposed to partisan,’ suggesting that the aim is for all voices to be heard, rather than for one party to prevail over others. Those with ‘inherent privilege’ defer whenever possible to others. The consolidation of power is discouraged, and resisted when necessary. Policing troublemakers becomes the job not of cops, but of assertive, well-trained listeners.

“Even with its inhabitants’ passion for local autonomy, though, Planet Occupy is a globalized place. People and their ideas travel freely, creating new opportunities and partnerships wherever they go. Assemblies share their plans and innovations over Interoccupy. (The movement’s conference-call network will have supplanted the original Internet, which was overrun by corporate advertising.) Following the urge in the Principles for ‘the broad application of open source,’ all ideas are common property, and these collective resources are, according to the Statement of Autonomy, valued more highly than money—if money still exists at all. SOPA-style censorship in the name of ownership is not okay. Also not okay is using violence to resolve conflicts. Almost every Occupy document makes some statement to this effect. Occupy Boston’s Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples envisions ‘a new era of peace and cooperation that will work for everyone.’ When conflict occurs, as is inevitable, people resist injustice through ‘non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance and love,’ in accordance with the Principles. Every such struggle is both local and global.

“Is this anarchist utopia realistic, or even desirable? It’s at least a little out there, perhaps a lot out there. But the Declaration of the Rights of Man, drafted while Louis XVI still had his head, wasn’t easy to comprehend in its time. The circumstances of our world exceed the politics we’re used to imagining for it, and the politics that are really necessary might therefore seem impossible. ‘We have come to Wall Street as refugees from this native dreamland, seeking asylum in the actual,’ explains Communiqué 1, an article in the movement journal Tidal. ‘We seek to rediscover and reclaim the world.’

“The movement’s documents contain fewer hints about economy. The Principles of Solidarity calls for ‘redefining how labor is valued,’ which may look something like the worker-owned cooperatives currently being developed at the Freedom Plaza occupation in Washington, D.C. Broadly speaking, human needs prevail over claims on profit. Companies are chartered for the public good, not private gain. Participatory democracy prevails in workplaces, neighborhoods, and other productive groupings. Many aspects of the economy—food, especially—remain local. This is necessary partly in order to preserve and sustain the natural environment. Everyone on Planet Occupy knows, after all, that if they don’t protect the planet, there will be nothing left to occupy.”

There must be no divisions, no exclusions. Goods must be shared on the basis of to each according to their needs. There are obvious links in the above to économie solidaire or human economy. What we have here is a version of a common revolutionary eschatology based on the negation of how capitalist states appear to be run. Production is of public goods, not for profit. This contrasts quite starkly with our approach in the international human economy project. We believe that limited markets can be fair distributors of goods and that states are good for redistribution and guarantees of social rights, as long as they make room for people to help themselves drawing on the mutuality that comes from living together, not just contracts and citizenship. I have been impressed by recent developments in Brazil. Alternative economic organization in Europe tends to be conceived of as bottom up initiatives that are independent of government and large corporations or against them. The Brazilian government, however, has played a major role in promoting and coordinating the solidarity economy. They have introduced a system of community banks, for example, which is organized by the government, but combines community currencies and microcredit in a locally accountable and participatory way. It is possible to imagine something similar in France under a socialist president. We might call this social democracy revisited and it is not to be sniffed at.

We do not subscribe to the capitalist model of markets or to governments imposing themselves in undemocratic ways; but we do expect the movement from below to be supported and even coordinated by the powers. I have not yet come across a civil society movement capable of launching a communications satellite. So there probably will be room for mutual accommodation between large-scale and small-scale economic organization in any imaginable future. The political terms of their cooperation remain to be settled, of course and there lies the scope for revolution.

It is thus possible to discern in the Occupy movement and the work of their most visible spokesmen, such as David Graeber, two competing visions of economic change, each with its counterpart in constructions of the idea of a human economy. One is “the world turned upside down”, a complete break with the past which might be envisaged as a return to a simpler and more wholesome way of life before the state and capitalism. The other insists that we can rely on people to be who they are, to find ways to come together and develop their mutual interests without violence or coercion. These two visions are struggling with each other in the politics of this revolutionary moment. That is why we have to think seriously about what revolutionary situations are like. It’s a very different world from one where we plan and build programs that people can live by in the long run. That is why I refer to James’s remarks on Lenin in a speech to students about the Guyanese academic-turned-revolutionary, Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa), who was blown up by an agent provocateur he trusted. He tells the students that they don’t understand what revolution is and neither did Rodney who lost his life as a result. No competent revolutionary organization should have left its leader unprotected in this way. (James himself was a Trotskyist dodging the bullets of Stalinist assassins while researching The Black Jacobins in Paris during the 1930s).

James quotes from Lenin’s letter of September 1917 where he talks about “insurrection”. It is important to have discriminating vocabulary rather than call everything a revolution. The events of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt were insurrections, not revolutions. Lenin identifies three components of any revolution and the party has nothing to do with any of them. James lists these as “Firstly, there must be a clash, a revolutionary upsurge of the people. Then, secondly, there must be a turning point, when the activity of the advanced ranks is at its height; and thirdly, the enemy must be vacillating.” Lenin is often misrepresented as an advocate of the vanguard party, He himself abandoned all those ideas as soon as he arrived at the Finland station and found the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets in the streets. Until then, he said, I was just another bourgeois politician. Revolutions change people. Lenin also said that insurrection is an art, not a science. At the end of his speech, James recalls a conversation with Trotsky in Mexico in 1938: “But how come, time and again, the revolutionary party – this is the party, not the mass movement — was wrong in its analysis of the situation and Lenin turns out to be right and set it the correct way? How did that happen?” And I expected him to tell me how Lenin knew philosophy, how he knew political analysis, how he knew psychology, or how he knew the revolution. He did not. He said, “Lenin always had his eyes upon the mass of the population, and when he saw the way they were going, he knew that tomorrow this was what was going to happen.” The prophet as anthropologist! And Gabriella Coleman is there in these hackers’ conversation rooms trying to figure out what they are doing.

So what are the implications of all this for the idea of a human economy? Like Jean-Louis, I seem to have spent the last few years producing books. It is a very different enterprise writing for educational purposes in the long run from trying to understand the moment we are living through. The best methodological statement on this I know is by Marx in the introduction to Grundrisse, the notes he compiled from 15 years of reading in the British Museum library which he completed in 1859. We must start, he says, from our concrete moment in world history, whatever that is. We start with the conditions we encounter and study them. Then we build analytical concepts and propositions using the results of what we have studied. Analysis is making sense of what we find out there. Some people — Marx here nodding rather unfairly in my view towards Hegel — think that the task finishes there, with the ideas. Once you have the analysis, you can rest happy, publish your book and get tenure. But the point of the analytical tools we have developed is to insert them back into the moment we are living in; and you can do that in many ways, through writing, propaganda, political parties, controlled experiments, social networking, blogs, whatever. The test of their validity lies in this dialectical process. Only then might we generate an analytically informed and empirically tested account of our moment in history seen as a synthetic whole. He plans to do this in Capital; but actually he never got there. He lists five prospective volumes culminating in a historical account of the world economy as a whole; but he hardly made it to three.

We all, if we are honest and realistic, have to locate ourselves at some point along the path that Marx charted. The core of the human economy project lies in dealing with the two approaches I have mentioned. I find it really fertile to juxtapose my own work with that of David Graeber, taking account of the similarities and differences in ways that change subtly over time. David arrived at the term “human economy” more or less when I did, in the last decade. He uses it to refer to an earlier period of human history, the world we have lost that survives in ethnographic accounts of primitive, exotic peoples, when people were purer than we are, living in a natural state of humanity. It’s an old story, but a powerful one and he tells it well. For him, the human economy is one whose objective is the social reproduction of people. It takes the form in Africa, for example, of cows being exchanged for women in marriage as a source of legitimation for children. This version of the human economy is based on principles diametrically opposed to those of capitalism, the market and the state.

Jean-Louis and I take the view that the human economy exists everywhere in some kind of dialectical tension with the dominant economic institutions of our day. It is not incompatible with money and markets. These can be made to serve human interests and needs, as they always have in varying degree, and they don’t have to take the exploitive form that they currently do in our societies as a source of unequal power and wealth. I for one like ordering books and apps online and don’t want to spend my days haggling over my daily bread without a means of payment or standing in line for a handout. We take our lead from Mauss’s insistence that markets and money rest on what Durkheim called “the non-contractual element in the contract”, a body of customs, laws and history that is obscured, marginalized and repressed by bourgeois ideology, even as it contains the living potential to humanize our economic institutions.

A counterpart to these competing constructions of the human economy may be found in the two visions of revolution I touched on earlier – a digital one that envisages a radical switch to the negation of what we know and an analogue version that expects to mobilize people by building on what they know and do already. A lot hinges on our ability to see a way towards combining these approaches rather than opposing them. I would argue that David and I already do that, each in our own way. The tension between them is to be found in all the current protest movements from Tahrir Square to OWS and Anonymous. We cannot afford to go back to the polarized and often sectarian politics of the twentieth century, when “revolution” and “reform” defined opposite sides in a destructive and partisan conflict. If we were aiming for anything in articulating the human economy idea, it was to get beyond the extremes of state socialism and free enterprise that misleadingly identified the sides in the Cold War. What is the Pentagon after all if not the largest socialist collective in world history?

I sum this up in the chart below. The human economy is conceived of as mediating between two paired antinomies – state and market, home and world – which helped to define the twentieth century’s dominant social form, “national capitalism” — the attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation though central bureaucracy in the name of a cultural community of national citizens. The economic crisis of our time may be understood as the collapse of this system. Rather than oppose the poles of either pair to each other, the aim is to synthesize them through a pragmatic focus on what people really do.

Three things count in our societies — people, machines and money, in that order. But money buys the machines that control the people. Our political task – and I believe it was Marx’s too – is to reverse that order of priority, not to help people escape from machines and money, but to encourage them to develop themselves through machines and money. To the idea of economic crisis and its antidotes, we must now add that of political revolution. I have argued here that the dynamics of revolution require active consideration in this context. Revolutions give rise to digital contrasts and rightly so, but human societies are built on analogue processes. This is not just an academic debating point. A lot hinges on how humanity responds to the contradictions of the turbulence ahead.

                                                                                                       THE HUMAN ECONOMY

                                                                                                                  WORLD

                                                                                EMPIRE                                                        GLOBALIZATION

                                                                                                                   People

                                                 STATE                                                      SOCIETY                                   MARKET

                                                                                                Machines                             Money

                                                                              NATION                                                           CAPITALISM

                                                                                                                    HOME

“I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. Yet, as you rightly point out, the America that we understand extends beyond the borders of the geographic America. What does this mean for the potential of a second American revolution? Where would it be triggered? Much as the Egyptian revolution was triggered by the events in Tunisia it is possible that America’s revolution would be triggered from a far-off land.”

Saul, Now that the Egyptian revolution is definite, we can pose your question in a new light. Everyone likens events there now to 1989, not least Obama, who also links Egypt to Gandhi, King and the Ghana revolution. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the second Russian revolution, could Tahrir Square be the beginning of the second American revolution? After all, it wasn’t Russians who started the former, but Germans and Czechs, the Eastern European victims of the Soviet empire.

We know that the American empire was launched by World War 2 and has gone through two phases since. The French called the first les trente glorieuses from 1945 to roughly 1975, which was the heyday of the Cold War, but also a period marked by a developmental state on both sides of the Cold War committed to expanding public services and the purchasing power of working people. It was also the time when European empire was abolished by the anti-colonial revolution. After the watershed of the 1970s, we went through three decades of what came to be known as neoliberal globalization in which the power of big money to organize the world for its own benefit was unfettered. The end of the Cold War, the rise of China, India and Brazil as economic powers and the digital revolution in communications speeded up the formation of world society under American hegemony, even as these developments undermined it. This ended with the financial crisis of 2008 and we are now in the uncharted waters of the third period which might take in a full-scale depression, world war, a global democratic revolution, the end of life on earth, who knows? Whatever happens, it will be different.

The second phase of the American empire was put in place during the energy crisis of the 1970s. The US economy depends on Middle East oil. Just as the British empire yoked England to India, the US and the Middle East are a single political entity. When the British and French made their botched attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, the Americans let them fail. First they built up Israel as their proxy in the region, a strategy that culminated in the six-day war of 1967. But the Egyptians and Syrians launched a surprise attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 to which the US, fearful of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, brokered a negotiated settlement. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 in return for the Sinai peninsular and Israel kept Gaza on hold for a future Palestinian state. 1973 also saw the reinforcement of OPEC and a big oil price hike which brought the Saudis into the Middle Eastern settlement as the leaders of a new oil cartel. In the last decade we have seen the installation of US armed forces in Iraq, the second largest oil producer, and a protracted campaign in Afghanistan (Afpak) which has the advantage of diverting attention from the Middle East and of starting a shooting war at the intersection of China, India, Russia and the Muslim world.

It is clear that Obama/Clinton were under strong pressure at the start of the Egyptian protests (themselves a response to the Tunisian revolution, as you say) to support the status quo, that is Mubarak or a stooge from his circle. The house of cards built up in the Middle East was only apparently stable. The Israelis have been increasingly intransigent with impunity, since they could count on the US, Egypt and the Saudis to keep a lid on things, a certainty increased by the formation of Iraq as an American armed camp within the region and the demonization of Iran as the Shiite bogeyman with “nuclear” capacity. And political security led to the accumulation of massive personal fortunes by the ruling elites, mirroring the financial excesses of the credit boom everywhere. This cascading inequality became more acute after the crash of September 2008. Demand in the world economy took a big hit, despite the use of taxpayers’ money in the major capitalist countries to bail out the banks and flood asset markets (but not consumer demand) with hot money. This has cushioned the blow for the time being in America, Europe and Japan at the risk of a sovereign debt crisis, but in many parts of the world unemployment, food prices and energy costs have all risen, making the social legacy of neoliberalism intolerable to the better educated, wired youth whose families are suffering and who see no future for themsleves under the status quo.

There are many scenarios out of 11th February 2011, several of them extremely unpleasant. It is not likely that Americans themselves would take the lead in a world revolution which potentially removes the free credit that the dollar’s hegemony has guaranteed for decades. But if the situation escalates, as seems likely, Americans will find themselves involved in a shooting war on more fronts than they can imagine now, not just the Middle East. Obama at last found the words to say something he probably believes after the Egyptians threw out Mubarak all by themselves. The first American revolution provides the rhetoric and even the substance of the second. American society is Janus-faced, pulled between its heritage as the only genuinely democratic polity on the planet and the imperial plutocracy it has become since. It is already deeply divided, as has been noted by the media of late. But the causes of this division cannot be understood within the parochial limits of American society itself. Who knows what will happen inside America once the impact of the Egyptian revolution spreads?

The Russians dismantled their own coercive bureaucracy instantly and with almost no loss of life. I have always believed in the American people’s practical good sense and love of freedom. The last few decades have seen a massive deterioration in the quality of American public culture, but the United States is still the home of modern democracy and the class that controls politics and the media today will not easily survive the turmoil unleashed in the world from now on. We are witnessing the end of a social form that I call “national capitalsim”. It was lanched in the 1860s by a series of political revolutions of which the American civil war was the most decisive. I would not be surprised if a world revolution triggers serious conflict within the US too.

I have been blogging here for years about the possibility of us launching a third World War soon (see “Conversations with Abdul Aziz“). This is not inevitable, but it is more likely if we don’t even talk about it and have no means of heading it off. I am greatly heartened by the non-violent strategy of the Egyptian protesters and the ease with which seemingly solid power structures have melted away in North Africa, as in eastern Europe in 1989. It is interesting that both regions form the immediate periphery of Western Europe which is not in great shape itself right now. If we embrace the possibility of a global democratic revolution now, rather than after a world war, the direst scenarios may not come to pass.

In American Civilization, CLR James argued that there was a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. This conflict was most advanced in America. The struggle was for civilization or barbarism, for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The intellectuals, he thought, were caught between the expansion of bureaucracy and the growing power and presence of people as a force in world society. Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism (psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right (fascism) or left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual as an independent witness and critic standing unequivocally for truth had been seriously compromised. The absorption of the bulk of intellectuals as wage slaves and pensioners of academic bureaucracy not only removed their independence but separated their specialized activities from social life.

If the Egyptian revolution has done nothing else, it has issued a wake up call to intellectuals everywhere. It is not outlandish to suggest that this may be the beginning of the second American revolution that James predicted, just possibly the world’s last.

China and India, who had been powerhouses of global economy and technology not long before, by the mid-20th century — indeed by 1980 — had per capita real incomes 5 and 7 percent the level of the US. Between the wars and after, they were symbols of the direst poverty and subject to terrible famines. In the last three decades China’s ratio of output per head to that of the US rose from 6 to 22 percent and India’s from 5 to 10 percent. Rapid convergence in productivity had of course already happened after the Second World War in Japan, South Korea and some other small Asian economies. Japan’s output, 20% of the US after the war, reached 90% in 1990 when the bubble burst. South Korea’s, at a tenth of the US in the mid-60s, has reached two-thirds now.

Convergence then is not new. What is different now is its scale and the fact that rates of growth are so divergent, in the opposite direction from before. Aggregate real output in the ‘emerging economies’ has increased by 40% in the last half-decade, by 70% in China and 55% in India, while Western growth has been 5%. “For emerging countries, the ‘great recession’ was a blip. For high-income countries, it was calamitous”, says Wolf. The West (W. Europe, US, Canada and Australasia) has 11% of the world’s population, India and China between them 37%. So the total impact of their rise, including the scope of their home markets, is that much more significant.

Catastrophes may intervene, but Asian economies will increasingly be able to rely on self-generated growth at home rather than exports. (This was the main theme of Lenin’s superb account of The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The process of the formation of a hiome-market for large-scale industry, 1899). The great convergence is irreversible. The world being born today, according to Parag Khanna in another FT article of last week, will resemble nothing so much as the multi-polar civilization of the high Middle Ages (12th century). Well, that’s a bit of a stretch given the distinctive forces making the 21st century world economy, but he has a point. My question is what significance does all this have for Africa’s place in the world?

The Asian manufacturers have been quicker that the US and Europe to realise Africa’s importance as the fastest-growing segment of world population, reaching a quarter by some estimates in mid-century. Whereas some Western intellectuals I know have said that the world economy would not miss Africa, with its 2% of global purchasing power, if it dropped off the map, the Asians are taking exploitation of the African market seriously. Again, all I hear in America and Europe is resentment over China’s ‘rapacious’ attitude to garnering Africa’s minerals; but this is to conceive of the continent in terms that were already old hat when Lenin wrote Imperialism (1916).

How might African economies orient themselves more effectively to the convergent multi-polar world of the 21st century? This requires not only understanding the possibilities of that world, but also developing a realistic appreciation of what African societies have become in the last century. In this latter regard, again we are more familiar with what Africa is not, that with what it now is. Everyone knows that — with the exception of South Africa — Africa failed to develop in the 20th century. In many cases it went backwards in the last half-century since independence from colonial rule. ‘Development’ meant embracing what I call “national capitalism”, the attempt to control markets, money and accumulation through central bureaucracy with the interest of the citizen body in mind. This was difficult for African peoples to achieve while they were part of colonial empires and also in the world economy carved out by the superpowers in the last half century.

So our first task is to discover what did happen in Africa during the twentieth century. The short answer is an urban revolution, the subject of my book, and I turn to the contours of that revolution in my next post. At the very least a convergent multi-polar world is not the North Atlantic-dominated version that brought Africa into the global economy over the last five centuries.

My essay is about the tension between the impersonal conditions of social life and the persons who inevitably carry it out. This relationship is poorly understood, perhaps never more than now, when the difference between individual citizens and business corporations operating on a scale larger than some countries has become obscured. My starting point is a legendary remark made in a movie by a professional killer to his victim, “Don’t take this personal, it’s just business.” But, according to my favorite American dictionary, a “person” is “a living human being” and what could be more personal than taking his life? Perhaps the hit man is referring to his own attitude, not to the effect. Killing people is a matter of routine for him, a “business”. Why should business be impersonal and, if it is, how can that be reconciled with the person who practices it?

Ideas are impersonal, human life is not. So, at one level, the issue is the relative priority to be accorded to life and ideas. Because the encounter is live and therefore already personal, the hit man has to warn his victim (and perhaps himself) not to take it so. It would seem that the personal and the impersonal are hard to separate in practice. Our language and culture contain the ongoing history of this attempt to separate social life into two distinct spheres. This is the core of capitalism’s moral economy; and gangster movies offer a vicarious opportunity to relive its contradictions.

At the heart of our public culture lies an impenetrable confusion of people, things and ideas. We no longer know how to act or in what context of mutual interdependence. The feminists were right to insist that the personal is political. The political too is often necessarily personal. But, if we relied on persons alone to make society, we would be back to feudalism or its modern equivalent, criminal mafias. There must be impersonal institutions that, at least in principle, work for everyone, regardless of who they are or who they know. We have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities; yet the impersonal engines of society lie far beyond our grasp. What place is there for the humanity of individual persons in the dehumanized social frameworks we live by? This is the hit man’s dilemma and it is ours too.

In exploring the historical relationship between human personality and impersonal society, I focus on the institution of private property. This has somehow evolved in only a few centuries from being a source of personal autonomy in a citizen commonwealth to becoming the means whereby a few huge business corporations seek to dominate world economy. Meanwhile, property has shifted its main point of reference from things to ideas; having once been “real,” it is now crucially “intellectual.” This development is related to the revolution in digital communications. Radical reductions in the cost of transferring information through machines have injected a new dynamic into human relationships. The current crisis over “intellectual property” is closely linked to a transformation that is pulling society towards a global frame of reference. Modern corporations rely on extracting rents from property as much as on profits from direct sales; and, as the saying goes, ‘Information wants to be free’, meaning that there is consistent downward pressure on prices for information-based goods and services. The social effort needed to maintain high prices in a world of increasingly free production and reproduction is what drives the conflict highlighted by this essay.

More and more we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. This has led to a world war, launched by transnational corporations with the full complicity of some governments, to privatize the cultural commons. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause they share. These concern: music; the moving image; language, literature and law; the internet; software; GMOs; pharmaceuticals; and academic life. The idea of “intellectual property” lends a spurious conceptual unity to what has been described as “information feudalism.” This “culture war” is one aspect of a broader shift in world production from West to East which will only be accelerated if western governments grant their corporations the rigid controls they seek. The central contradiction of neo-liberalism is that this attempt to establish a new kind of global command economy uses digital technologies that favour a more decentralized networked form of society.

From the 1860s onwards the leading industrial countries adopted a system of national capitalism, the management of accumulation and markets by central bureaucracies. Faced with unruly urban populations, big money made an alliance with the traditional ruling classes to secure unequal contracts between owners and workers, sellers and buyers, lenders and borrowers. The problem then and now is, how do you make people pay up? New legal frameworks were devised granting to corporations both limited liability and the private property rights of individual citizens. In its heyday, national capitalism was able to police this confusing situation in the interests of large-scale bureaucracy. But in the last 25 years, transnational society has seen an escalating conflict between the most powerful bureaucracies in the world and dispersed coalitions of networked activists.

My question is, How is democracy attainable unless each of us can determine our own personal responsibility in a world driven by unknowably remote impersonal forces? We need a new humanism that meets the measure of our common humanity. This humanism must work through the impersonal institutions of money and machines, not against them.

The moral dilemma in politics, law, and business

Morality concerns the principles of good behavior, what we ought to do. Although it is possible to express “the good” abstractly as a rule – “always be kind to children and animals” — morality can only be expected of persons who face the choice to be good or otherwise in complex situations that cannot be reduced to simple rules. What politics, law and business have in common is that they define “the good” in a collective sense. A group must be protected from subversion, disorder or loss and this more general good may require leaders in particular to sacrifice personal morality to that impersonal end. It costs too much if people must always be forced to do what you want. It helps if they can be persuaded to do something because they believe it is right. Often that means believing that a leader is a good person. It is not easy in practice to separate the impersonal ends of society from their personal instruments.

When society is organized through depersonalized rules, as ours has been for a century or more, the normative exclusion of personal judgment as a force for good or evil provokes a permanent moral crisis. It is hard to discuss this crisis using the methods of impersonal social science, although that hasn’t stopped some from trying. Here I draw principally on works of fiction, especially movies, since they are designed to give dramatic expression to this very question. But I will also refer to Max Weber’s historical sociology. I start with Company, an Indian film about organized crime in Mumbai.

The crisis of this movie comes when Mallik, the big boss, tries to limit his reliance on Chandu, a young lieutenant he has plucked from nowhere. He delegates a hit to Chandu, the assassination of a politician, that he decides to abort for operational reasons. Mallik moves swiftly to have Chandu killed; but, thanks to the friendship of their women and the mobile phone, he escapes and civil war breaks out, spreading as far as Nairobi. The resulting mayhem fragments the Company and lends strength to their enemies, including the police. Towards the end, someone says, “whatever’s happening is the fault of the business, not one man.” But, of course, the business can only operate with one big boss or it fragments into impotence, as in this case. Chandu hands himself over to the state and tells Mallik. “I am about to do what I think is right. If you suffer any losses, don’t take it personally.” Don’t take this personal, it’s just business. But actually this is Chandu’s attempt to salvage morality from the mess. The hit man’s dilemma is between morality and politics.

Chandu embodies this contradiction. He is a classic individualist, in a long line of American westerns and gangster comic strips, the loner who doesn’t believe in justice unless he does it himself. He considers official society to be as corrupt as he is, but less honest; and in any case he is excluded from it. Chandu meets his match in the clever and basically decent policeman, Sreenivasan. The latter knows the police can’t be effective if they always stay within the law. The law doesn’t measure up, but it is all we have if we are not to be subject to rule by the mob. Morality is what we ought to do, the law is what we can get away with. The lines between official politics, the law and crime are blurred in practice, but the public prefers to believe that they are separate.

One recurrent jingle chants in Hindi “Yes, it stinks, but it’s business.” Gangster movies allow us to see society from outside the self-protective cocoon of law, bureaucracy and business that the middle classes normally inhabit. Moreover, by evoking normal capitalism, the gangster “firm” offers a metaphor for its dark side. Tony Soprano crosses the thin line between hoodlum and suburbanite many times every day. Impersonal society in its official guise can be just as immoral as criminal enterprise, except that thieves have personal lives and morality of a sort, whereas abstract impersonal norms have no room for morality at all.

Company’s series of human catastrophes hinges on an objective contradiction, the one Max Weber identified with patrimonial bureaucracy. The origins of impersonal government lie in the king’s use of palace organization to assert his independence from the feudal barons. He recruits to his own staff individuals who owe allegiance solely to him. But distant officials are pulled towards asserting their own independence of him by their reliance on local resources. If any of his henchmen get too big, they might try to take his place. Relatively stable forms depend on institutional rules for checking this structural contradiction.

Most of Shakespeare’s history plays and tragedies hinge on this tension between human personality and impersonal institutions. How can a holder of high office reconcile his public role with being just a man? If feudalism was a mess and basically unjust, what is the role for human personality in a more equal and universal social system? Is it possible to move beyond kingship and mob warfare to a genuinely democratic society? His Elizabethan audiences sat on the edge of their seats, knowing that the future of their own Tudor state was at stake in the drama. When Hamlet asks “To be or not to be?”, he is posing the dilemma that forces some people to choose to be human or inhuman, personal or depersonalized, often as a matter of routine. Shakespeare dug deeper into this issue than anyone has since. The world has changed less since then than we sometimes think and the dialectic of personal and impersonal agency is just as strong now as it was then. Stories about gangsters, both medieval and modern, remind us that the moral dilemmas of political life have not gone away.

Impersonal society as a modern project

The twentieth century was built on a universal social experiment. Society was conceived of as an impersonal mechanism defined by international division of labor, national bureaucracy and scientific laws understood only by experts. Not surprisingly, most people feel ignorant and impotent in the face of such a society. Yet, we have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities who make a difference. So we experience society as personal and impersonal at once, despite the huge cultural effort that seeks to separate the two. “Business” lies at the heart of the matter.

The hit man lives in a society where normal business often requires the suspension of ordinary humanity – sacking an employee, calling in a loan, evicting a tenant. We might be tempted to take such losses personally, but the carrier of the message is merely an instrument of economic logic, “the bottom line.” We are taught that the payment of money makes a huge difference to a transaction. Why? Wage labour became the norm in nineteenth century Europe. This led to an attempt to separate the spheres in which paid and unpaid work predominated respectively. The first was objective and impersonal, specialised and calculated; the second was subjective and personal, diffuse, based on long-term interdependence. One sphere is a zone of infinite scope where things, and increasingly human creativity, are bought and sold for money, the market. The second is a protected sphere of domestic life, where intimate personal relations hold sway, home. The market is unbounded and unknowable, whereas the bounds of domestic life are known only too well. This duality is the moral and practical foundation of capitalist economy.

All the efforts of economists to insist on the autonomy of market logic cannot disguise the fact that businesses relations have a personal and social component, particularly when the commodity being bought and sold is human creativity. Where does the social pressure come from to make business impersonal? Weber had one answer: rational calculation of profit in enterprises depends on the capitalist’s ability to control product and factor markets, especially that for labor. But human work is not an object separable from the person performing it, so people must be taught to submit to the impersonal disciplines of the workplace. The war to impose this submission has never been completely won. So, just as money is intrinsic to the home economy, personality remains intrinsic to the workplace, which means that the cultural effort required to keep the two spheres separate is huge. We, who have submitted to this confusing paradigm of division, often accuse others of backwardness for refusing to acknowledge its force. The word we use is “corruption.” But, as Chandu insisted, the rhetoric that separates formal organization from informal practice might well be less honest than an open acknowledgment of their interdependence.

Private property: a short history

The idea of personal agency in market situations is closely tied to that of private property. Private property is the ability of an individual owner to command exclusive rights over something against the rest of the world. We assume that, once we have bought an item, we can do what we like with it. The state secures the market exchange, but in a remote way that does not ordinarily impinge on our consciousness. Private property law was originally seen as a means of protecting individual citizens from the arbitrary power of rulers. But in the last century and a half national governments and corporations operating on a transnational scale have acquired these same property rights. Far from shoring up liberal democracy, private property in this latter guise favors a totalitarianism that requires personal identity to conform to the needs of impersonal institutions. Where did this state of affairs come from?

If a business owes more money than its assets are worth, the original investors are personally responsible for the debt. In 1580, Queen Elizabeth I granted “limited freedom from liability” to The Golden Hind, a ship owned by Sir Francis Drake in which she was the largest shareholder. This meant that, if the enterprise incurred large debts, investors were limited in their liability only to the amount of their initial investment, leaving creditors to pick up the rest. In fact, the returns on this low-risk investment were 5,000 percent and the queen was well-pleased. This business model underlies the modern corporation. World trade was then dominated by the Dutch; so Queen Elizabeth granted a charter in 1600 to the East India Company, a group of merchants and aristocrats based on the City of London. Over the next two centuries this grew to a considerable size without ever losing its close ties to national government.

By the 1770s, however, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Dutch traders and American smugglers were by-passing the company’s monopoly to sell cheaper tea to the small businesses supplying the lucrative American market. The Tea Act of 1773 gave the East India Company exclusive rights to sell tea to the American colonies, exempted it from taxes levied on exports to America and granted a tax refund on 17 million pounds of tea then stored unsold in England. This substantially increased the company’s profitability (the King was a major stockholder) and allowed it to undercut the many small businesses retailing tea in America. The Boston tea party was the result.

Thomas Jefferson saw three main threats to democracy — governing elites, organized religion and commercial monopolists (whom he referred to as “pseudo-aristocrats”). It is hardly surprising that he was keen to include freedom from monopoly in the Bill of Rights. But, mainly thanks to his Federalist opponents, that particular clause slipped through the cracks of the constitution. From then on corporations sought to win the constitutional rights of individual citizens for their businesses. This campaign built up momentum after the Civil War, when the railroads were booming. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 sought to guarantee the equal protection of the laws to former slaves, by making illegal discriminatory provision of public services. The railroads began suing states and local authorities for enacting regulations designed specifically to control them, on the grounds that this created “different classes of persons.” The corporations could afford to keep coming back to the courts until they won. And eventually they did, in the 1886 Supreme Court decision concerning Santa Clara County vs. the Southern Pacific Railroad.

The railroad was being sued by the county for back taxes, but its lawyers claimed that the company was a person entitled to human rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. There is some dispute over the authenticity of the record, but this judgment opened the floodgates: in the following quarter-century, of over 300 Fourteenth Amendment cases considered by the Supreme Court, almost all were brought by corporations claiming the rights of natural persons, only 19 involved African Americans. Today, if a town wants to protect its small shopkeepers by denying Walmart the right to open a superstore there, it will risk facing an expensive lawsuit brought to defend the corporation’s constitutional rights as a person.

We still think of private property as belonging to living persons and oppose private and public spheres on that basis. But abstract entities like governments and corporations can also hold exclusive rights in something against the world. At the same time corporations have retained their special legal privileges, such as limited liability for bad debts. We are understandably confused by General Motors having the same rights as any living person, while being exempted from responsibilities imposed on the rest of us. This constitutes a major obstacle not only to the practice of democracy, but also to thinking about it, especially since most intellectuals uncritically reproduce this very confusion.

Not only has private property evolved from individual ownership to corporate forms, but its focus has also shifted from “real” to “intellectual” property, from material objects to ideas. This is partly because the digital revolution has led to the economic preponderance of information services whose reproduction and transmission is often costless. As with corporate personhood there is sleight of hand involved. If I steal your cow, its loss is material, since only one of us can benefit from its milk. But if I copy a CD or DVD, I am denying no-one access to it. Yet corporate lobbyists use this misleading analogy to influence courts and legislators to treat duplication of their “property” as “theft” or even “piracy.” It is ironic that the United States, born in an act of resistance against corporate monopoly, should now be imposing the same thing onto the world through an intellectual property treaty linked to access to the American market.

The Digital Revolution

What matters in this world is money, machines and people, in that order. Our political task is to reverse the order. But most intellectuals know very little about any of them, being preoccupied with their own production of ideas. We need a new humanism appropriate to a world dominated by the impersonal power of money and machines. The hit man’s dilemma comes from experiencing the world as a conflict between his inner subjectivity and the objective conditions of his social role. His sense of himself as a good person inside contrasts with what he does outside. Fiction (novels, movies, plays) normally does a better job of capturing this tension than the writings of professional thinkers. Moreover, the audience enters the plot imaginatively in a way that allows for the free interplay of subjectivity and history in microcosm. We want to integrate the inside and the outside, the personal and the impersonal, but the idea of a moral politics combining them often seems unattainable. How is human communication evolving in the context of the digital revolution and does that favor the integration we seek or the opposite.

We all enter this extraordinary time with a bundle of advantages and drawbacks. I take pride in a facility for writing coherent e-mail messages at a pace somewhere between a letter and a phone-call. Yet I also know that communicating through keyboards will soon be replaced by audio-visual methods, thereby removing one more link between the book and the screen. My academic colleagues are still fighting the war against television, refusing to allow one into a living room designed to show off their books. It’s all relative. Face-to-face exchanges, instead of being displaced by telecommunications, take on an added value when we spend the working day in front of a computer screen. Simple pursuits like reading and conversation, which used to be taken for granted when they monopolized our means of communication, can be approached in a more analytical and creative frame of mind, now that there are so many other ways of acquiring and transmitting ideas. I have a virtual office, my lap top, to accommodate a life of movement; but I was forced to recognize the value of my own memory when it was stolen. Each of us experiences the digital revolution in our own way; yet there are changes taking place that affect us all.

The digital revolution consists of rapid changes in the size, cost and especially speed of machines capable of processing information. The world economy is being transformed once more by radical reductions in the cost of producing a basic commodity, in this case the transfer of information. There was a time when commodities traded internationally were things extracted from the ground and services were performed locally in person. Now the person answering your business call could be located anywhere in the world and a growing number of service jobs are exposed to global competition. Vast profits are to be made in entertainment, education, the media, finance, software and all the other information services. But the digital revolution poses specific problems for accumulation since there is continuous downward pressure on prices in this sector arising from the ease of copying proprietary products.

The cheapening of the cost of information transfers affects long-distance market relations. Money was traditionally impersonal so that it could retain its value when it moved between people who might not even know each other. It was an instrument detached from the persons who use it. Bank credit on the other hand has always been more directly personal, being linked to the trustworthiness of individuals. The idea that transactions involving money are essentially amoral comes from its impersonal form, but until recently, in most societies, the bulk of economic life was carried out by people who knew each other and were able to discriminate between individuals on the basis of experience. The transition to impersonal economic institutions came suddenly. People were used to engaging with shopkeepers personally; and each purchase took place under particular circumstances, involving variable price, quality and credit terms, all of them based on the specific relationship between trader and customer. It was a shock to encounter goods identified by little white cards with non-negotiable prices on them. Fixed prices came just over a century ago from the first department stores, where customers dealt face-to-face with assistants who had no power to negotiate. That power rested with owners and managers who were now removed from the point of sale, unlike the small shopkeeper. The main imperative of management was to control subordinates; and this ethos stretched back to the production lines as well as outwards to an anonymous market of consumers whose tastes were manipulated by public advertising.

The era of mass production and consumption may be ending as a result of cheap information transfers. It is now possible to attach a lot of information about individuals to transactions at distance. For example, amazon.com keeps a record of every book I have bought from them and they make recommendations for new purchases on this basis. This is similar to the small bookseller who reserves a book for a favorite customer, but it all takes place anonymously at distance. Some firms are already moving towards a system known as Customer Retail Maintenance (CRM) based on data banks that know no limit in scope. This enables them to target buyers who generate above average revenues. Nowhere has this process gone further than in the market for personal credit. The number and variety of customized financial instruments now on offer is growing exponentially. It is not quite the same as bespoke tailoring, but the trend is to restore personal identity to what were largely impersonal contracts. For many people, this has introduced new conditions of engagement with the impersonal economy. It will be some tim before its social effects are known, but digitized commerce has already spawned a war for control of the value generated by sales of information-based commodities. The slogan of this war is “intellectual property rights.”

Intellectual property

Our world resembles the old regime of agrarian civilization, with unequal power shared between enforcers and rentiers. We are now witnessing the triumph of that “pseudo-aristocracy” of commercial monopolists that Jefferson once saw as the main danger to liberal democracy. If classical political economy’s slogan of free trade was aimed at dislodging traditional feudalism, we have to get our minds around the current situation in which feudal principles are being applied to “free markets” in the name of spreading liberal democracy around the planet.

The phrase “intellectual property” seems to have been invented by Lysander Spooner. He was an old-fashioned liberal philosopher of the sort that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century. If you haven’t heard of him, it may be because he wanted to restrict use of his words without permission or payment. The American civil war buried that libertarian moment of individual creativity and launched a new phase of corporate capitalism that has come to its full maturity in the neo-liberal world economy today. A drive to privatize access to culture has led to a “second enclosure of the commons”. This latter-day enclosure movement also rests on confusing ordinary individuals with highly centralized corporations.

The rise of intellectual property is recent, but its origin lies in the Berne Convention on international copyright of 1886 (the same year as the corporate personhood decision!). The World Intellectual Property Organization was formed in 1967 and n 1994 the World Trade Organization introduced the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (known somewhat ironically as TRIPs). The enactment of TRIPs is an unprecedented attempt to make US-style intellectual property law mandatory for all countries participating in global trade.

American publishers routinely ignored British copyright from the beginning and the United States was slow to sign international agreements on the subject. It only joined the Berne Convention in 1989! When the Southeast Asian “tiger” economies began their drive for modern growth in the 1960s, they did not respect international copyright, tacitly sanctioning the cheap reproduction of American textbooks that their people could not afford otherwise. With their educational expansion achieved, these “pirates” joined the Berne Convention in the 1990s. But by then the issue had shifted from books to music, movies and software. The US tried out its new recipe for globalization of intellectual property law when Ronald Reagan introduced the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act in 1983. This initiative established the principle of linking trade rules to intellectual property and in the 1990s the USA entered bilateral treaties with many countries enforcing acceptance of TRIPs through the threat of exclusion from the American market. Many countries also signed bilateral treaties exempting US citizens from future prosecution for war crimes. Here then we have the means of a new American empire – military force, mercantilism and intellectual property

The first sector to feel the full implications of the digital revolution has been recorded music. The feudal barons of the industry may have already lost the war against free peer-to-peer exchange of music files. The movie industry is at a more critical stage. Here the main studios have generated huge revenues from sales of video or DVD copies and the Moving Pictures Association has been leading the drive to fight “piracy.” This campaign is technical as well as legal, with machine modification playing a central role in restricting the options of users. A century ago, film-makers went West to Hollywood to escape Edison’s East Coast monopoly. Pioneers like Walt Disney exemplified the frontier mentality of the industry then, lifting much of his first Mickey Mouse cartoon from a Buster Keaton movie without attribution. Now the Disney Corporation lobbies for the extension of copyright laws and uses litigation to protect its private ownership of images and words that would have been in the public domain until recently.

The market for software is crucial to the struggle over intellectual property. Software consists of disembodied machines, recipes of pure information that achieve their effects through a variety of material forms (hardware). Since reproduction of these recipes is virtually costless, their exclusive ownership as commodities is difficult. Even so, the Microsoft Corporation has built one of the great modern monoplies for its Windows system by licensing software whose source code is kept secret from the public. A movement has arisen to challenge this strategy of commercial command and control, Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), which is itself divided between those who oppose selling as such and those who accept money payment as long as users have access to the source code and can modify and reproduce it with acknowledgment. These initiatives accept the need for legal protection though such instruments as the General Public License (GPL) and the Creative Commons license.

FLOSS has one great advantage over the monopolists. It can pool the talents of tens of thousands of software engineers, both amateur and professional, whereas Microsoft relies on its customers to discover problems through trial and error. Moreover, FLOSS licenses are less restrictive and this has made open source software attractive to some of the industry leaders. IBM has now embraced Linux and is helping Lula’s Brazilian government to convert the public sector to open source software. Microsoft’s business methods are notoriously predatory, as in the browser war with Netscape that led to anti-trust law suit. Although America still dominates market share, the digital revolution is diffusing faster than any previous communications technology.

The corporations rely on the laws and policing powers of venal governments to maintain artificially high profits and rents in fields stretching from entertainment to the chemical industry. It is questionable whether the USA can impose its own strategy on the rest of the planet. Just as Edison’s monopoly was once circumvented by Hollywood, the contemporary shift of economic power to Asia exposes the cracks in this American bid for empire. It’s an old story, the dynamism of small entrepreneurs versus monopolies protected by state power. The Americans have been there before and their own ideology fuels resistance to the corporate takeover.

The Crisis of the Intellectuals Revisited

Lindsay Waters, humanities editor for Harvard University Press, has claimed that the current explosion of academic publishing is a bubble as certain to burst as the dot com boom. His essay is a warning to academics, in the face of the corporate takeover of the university,

“….to preserve and protect the independence of their activities, before the market becomes our prison and the value of the book becomes undermined…. The commercialization of higher education has caused innovation in the humanities to come to a standstill.”

Publishing, he says, has become more concerned with quantity than quality and “the drive to mechanize the university has proved lethal over the last three decades.” Waters’ jeremiad for the humanities is based on sound evidence, but his analysis of the reasons for their decline puts the blame on money and machines, so that his call for resistance to university administrations has no practical basis in contemporary social and technical conditions. If we want to promote humanism, we should ask what historical conditions make our initiative possible and why we in particular might succeed.

In 1993 Anna Grimshaw and I published a pamphlet, Anthropology and the crisis of the intellectuals. We placed anthropology’s compromised relationship to academic bureaucracy within the general crisis facing modern intellectuals, as identified by C.L.R. James in American Civilization. For James there was a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. The struggle was for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The intellectuals were caught between the expansion of bureaucracy and the growing presence of people as a force in world society. Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism (psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right (fascism) or left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual as an independent witness standing for truth had been compromised. The absorption of the bulk of intellectuals into bureaucracy as wage slaves and pensioners not only removed their independence, but separated their specialized activities from social life.

The solution to our dilemmas requires new patterns of social engagement extending beyond the universities to the widest reaches of world society. This in turn depends first on acknowledging how people everywhere are pushing back the boundaries of the old society and second on being open to a universality that has been driven underground by national capitalism and would be buried forever if the current drive to privatize the cultural commons is allowed to succeed.

Waters was right to call for a humanist revival. But this should be through the medium of money, markets and machines, not despite them. In my recent book on money, my first idea was that the cheapening of information transfers as a result of the digital revolution might allow the impersonal economy of the twentieth century to be “repersonalized,” by attaching more information to individual transactions and potentially granting individuals greater control over work, consumption and credit. But I soon realized that a personal economy would return us all to the world of gangsters, both medieval and modern. We need new impersonal norms capable of standardizing social interactions where the nation-state can no longer reach – law, money, education, technology and so on. Our task is not to replace impersonal society with personal life, but to discover new ways of combining them.

The hit man’s dilemma is to be human or inhuman. It is a dilemma shared by kings, generals, presidents and CEOs, when they contemplate the human cost of an action undertaken on behalf of some collective interest. Our ability to curb the high-handed behavior of the powerful has been deeply undermined by a legal culture granting business corporations the rights of living persons. The liberal revolution against the old regime sought to grant free citizens equal (and therefore impersonal) rights in society. This hinged on the difference between individual persons and impersonal institutions. Such a separation was intrinsic to the rise of modern capitalism, as we have seen. But capitalism took a bureaucratic turn in the late nineteenth century, when the legal distinction between real and artificial persons was collapsed. Subsequently the forces moving society became so impersonal that most people lost any sense of their own responsibility for common affairs. This gave some intellectuals an excuse to promote anti-liberal ideologies, drawing on the same confusion of people, ideas and things that was now normal in economic law.

Today the stronger states and transnational corporations ride roughshod over human rights and international law itself in the name of the “free market.” The struggle to subvert this creeping “information feudalism” must take place at many different levels. We might, for example, re-examine the metaphysics of personal agency and the impersonal conditions of its expression. Such an enquiry should be explicitly historical. For indifference to history allows the heirs of America’s anti-colonial revolution to reinvent the corporate monopolies of absolutist monarchy in the name of liberal democracy. If the Europeans can’t see through this, perhaps the Chinese, Indians or Brazilians will.

In John Locke’s terms, we must deal with the semantic criminals who pollute our public discourse with their dissembling words. These are the hired spokesmen of the economic criminals who aim to hijack the machine revolution for their own immoral ends. As for the notion that there is a difference between the operational standards of legal and illegal businesses, well, nobody believes that any more, do they? Yet we also accept the claim that plutocracy is in the general interest. Perhaps it takes a Watergate to explode this doublethink and reveal the dishonest premises of contemporary society.

Conclusions

The formal conclusions of this essay are consistent with late Durkheim. Every human being is a unique person who lives in society. We are therefore all individual and social at the same time and the two are inseparable in our experience. Society is both inside and outside us; and a lot rides on our ability to tell the difference as well as to make a meaningful connection between them. Society is personal when it is lived by each of us in particular; it is impersonal when it takes the form of collective ideas. It is therefore just as damaging to insist on a radical separation of individuals and society (or of life and ideas) as it is to collapse the difference between them. Modern capitalism rests on a division between personal and impersonal spheres of social life. The institution of private property initially drove a conceptual wedge between our individuality and an active sense of belonging to society. Indeed the latter was made invisible or at least unreachable for most of us. But then private property assumed the form of public ownership by large business corporations and even governments. It then became convenient to collapse the difference between personal and impersonal spheres in law, leaving a general confusion between the rights of individual citizens and those of abstract social entities wielding far more power than any human being. The consequences for democracy are disastrous.

Max Weber, writing a century ago in the full spate of a bureaucratic revolution powered by machine industry, saw no social force capable of resisting a highly centralized version of impersonal society. For us, looking back at the twentieth century, bureaucratic capitalism has evolved to a highly mobile form operating on a global scale; while national bureaucracy and its industrial base seem to be an endangered species. Before public bureaucracy is killed off, we need to ask how the hopes it once embodied might be preserved, if only as an institutional alternative to the transnational corporations now dominating world economy. For all my criticisms of corporate monopolists, I believe that some economic functions can only be performed by corporations at this time and that capitalism’s historical mission to bring cheap commodities to the human masses is still far from complete. So progressive capitalist firms can take a leading part in dismantling the resuscitated old regime that calls itself “neo-liberalism”.

The digital revolution has speeded up human connection at the world level. Society now takes a number of forms – global, regional, national and local. We need new impersonal norms to guide our social interactions in such a world, as long as the significance of individual personalities is recognized. The stage is set for a new humanism capable of uniting these poles of our existence. The word “humanity” contains within itself the elements of our predicament and their potential synthesis. It is a collective noun, a moral quality and a historical project for our species. We are still primitives; but eventually we, the people, will make society on our own terms, if we master the means of its development, machines and money. In the course of doing so, we will encounter immense social forces bent on denying the drive for a genuine democracy. My essay has aimed to clarify who the sides and what the stakes are in this struggle for world society.

But there is more to it than class war. Somehow, in the last decade or two, the idea of government has been replaced by public talk of “governance” in acknowledgment that responsibility for maintaining social order has shifted from the nation-state’s monopoly. Even more recently, this talk has taken a distinctly ethical shift to a focus on “good governance”. This means moral behavior on the part of persons holding office and it constitutes a revival of Durkheim’s agenda as a solution to Weber’s gloomy prognosis for the legal rationality of bureaucratic domination. It speaks to a genuine desire to fill the gap between politics and morality left by impersonal society. The remarkable strength of religious feeling in America and its Islamic antithesis is not an anomalous hangover from the past, but rather evidence of the need for meaningful connection when the secular state’s grip on society has been weakened. It was never strong in the USA to start with. If science is the commitment to know the world objectively and art the means of expressing oneself subjectively, religion was and is a bridge between subject and object, a way of making meaningful connection between something inside oneself and the world outside. For a time it seemed that science had driven religion from the governance of modern societies, but the search is on now for new forms of religion capable of reconciling scientific laws with personal experience. Kant’s cosmopolitan moral politics offer one vision of the course such a religious revival might take. It turns out that the hit man’s dilemma contains the seeds of a general human crisis.

A summary of Keith Hart The Hit Man’s Dilemma: or business, personal and impersonal (Prickly Paradigm, Chicago, 2005)

AND NOW: the video!! Click on Read more for a 12-part lecture and discussion lasting about an hour and a half.

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I approach the anthropology of money through four themes:

Money as memory, a meaningful link between persons and communities
Money as idea and object, the rise of virtual economy
Money as ‘heads & tails’, the impersonal expression of states and markets
Money as what people use it for, the potential for economic democracy

Following Marx, I conceive of ‘commoditization’ as a historical dialectic of social abstraction that is closely linked to the rise of money as a universal social principle. If we do things for each other in society, these services have to be separated from what we do for ourselves. This process draws us into ever-widening circles of interdependence based on calculated exchange. The money circuit is becoming detached from production, trade and politics. I ask if the euro is something new or a throwback to older forms. In future people everywhere will issue their own money instruments. Meanwhile, the euro’s movement in history offers a glimpse of where world society is heading. Money is a suitable strategic focus for anthropological study of that society.

Money and method

My first attempt to approach money as an object of anthropological enquiry was a lecture given two decades ago (Hart, 1986). Malinowski (1961 [1922]) set a trend for anthropologists to dispute economic universals in polarised terms, juxtaposing exotic facts and western folk theories, without acknowledging the influence of contemporary history on their own ideas. My lecture had three parts which, taken together, constituted a method.

“First, we should be more explicitly aware of the concrete conditions which stimulate our interest in some abstract problems rather than others. This means asking what it is in the world as we experience it that informs our researches, whether directly or indirectly. Second, it is no good taking potshots at vulgar reductions of economic ideas, when the intellectual history of western economic thought is itself extremely plural, even contradictory. A constructive reading of that intellectual history might have served Malinowski’s ethnographic analysis better than the straw man he chose to attack. Finally, when historical awareness and a more sophisticated intellectual apparatus are combined with our discipline’s standby of ethnographic fieldwork, the resulting anthropological analysis offers a more secure foundation for critical understanding of the world in which we live.” (Hart, 1986 : 637).

So I first located the problem of money in contemporary economic history, arguing that state control of money was being undermined in the leading capitalist societies. Then I traced two strands of western monetary theory explaining money as a token of authority issued by states or as a commodity made by markets. These strands came together in the writings of Keynes (1930). But, rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organization (“heads and tails”), economic policy has swung wildly between the two extremes (“heads or tails?”). Last I showed that the token/commodity pair could inform a reanalysis of Malinowski’s ethnography.

“Anthropologists have to be capable of comparing their exotica with a more profound picture of ideas and realities in the industrial world that sustains us. Conventional economic reasoning fails to enlighten us because it is so unremittingly one-dimensional. The coin has two sides for a good reason – both are indispensable. Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons….Today’s effort is an act of bricolage rather than brokerage, formed from a vision of the anthropologist as a handyman who can help repair the damage done by professionals.” (Ibid : 638-9).

Some anthropologists (e.g. Parry and Bloch, 1989; Foster, 1999; Guyer, 2004) have drawn on this framework for the purposes of a dynamic ethnographic analysis, without embracing world history or the theories of economists. In other words, the academic division of labour still reigns supreme and most anthropologists prefer to stay on familiar ground rather than risk being exposed as naïve interlopers on territory made familiar through common journalism or already colonized by experts.

In Closed Systems and Open Minds (Gluckman, 1964), an anthropologist and an economist explored “the limits of naivety” in social anthropology. They argued that anthropologists, given their pretension to address humanity as a whole, are obliged to open themselves up to the full complexity of social reality. At some stage they must seek analytical closure in order to draw simple patterns from these open-ended inquiries; and these abstractions may often seem to be naïve from the perspective of other disciplines. Gluckman had in mind the rich texture of ethnographic encounters, whereas I was suggesting that conjectural history, overthrown by fieldwork-based ethnography, should be rehabilitated, even if specialists can easily show the naivety of anthropologist’s accounts. Specialization can be an obstacle to the growth of knowledge; for specialists become prisoners of their expertise (Popper, 1997). Anthropologists have long enjoyed a certain intellectual freedom that can be invigorating for the more conventional sciences. We just have to be more explicit about how this comes about.

Foucault (1973 [1966]) ended his “archaeology of the human sciences” with some reflections on why psychoanalysis and social anthropology (ethnologie) “…occupy a privileged position in our knowledge”:

“…because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question…what may seem, in other respects, to be established.” (1973 : 373) “[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those sciences, they animate its whole surface…[They] are ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences. (Ibid:379)

Foucault attributed anthropology’s originality to its being both “traditionally the knowledge we have of the peoples without histories” and “situated in the dimension of historicity”, by which he meant “within the historical sovereignty of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself” (ibid : 376-7). He was sure the human sciences had reached their limit and this was doubly true of a discipline whose premises were being undermined by the collapse of European empire. Given the disappearance of the traditional object of anthropology, we have to find not only a new one, but also a theory and method appropriate to it. This means identifying the historicity of our own moment, as well as complementing ethnographic fieldwork with world history and humanist philosophy (Hart, 2003).

I propose that the object of anthropology should be the making of world society or the human universal. One name for this is “humanity”, at once a collective noun, a moral quality and a historical project for our species. Another is “the people”, whom contemporary ethnographers have studied assiduously in all their differences, but without much sense of what makes them the same. Anthropology’s object in the nineteenth century was world history, but this became discredited by its evolutionary racism. Before that, the liberal philosophers found speculation about humanity as a whole indispensable to the making of democracy. Kant (2006 [1798]) established “anthropology” as the scholarly name for this project. How might these older traditions be reconciled with the fragmented cultural relativism of twentieth-century ethnography? We should not repudiate the revolutionary principle of joining the people where they live in order to find out what they think and do. Contemporary anthropologists have justly celebrated cultural variety in the here and now; but they have neglected longer term perspectives on human history and have privileged collective norms over the personal experience of individuals.

In addition to drawing on the historical sequence of paradigms for anthropology, I would add the existentialist or romantic quest for understanding how individuals make sense of their relationship to the human predicament in general (Hart, 2003). Humanity is after all facing a highly uncertain future affecting all life on this planet; and we are increasingly aware that each of us is a unique personality with the chance to make a difference. Such a focus could be labeled “self in the world” or “subjects in history”; and it should lead anthropologists to take a greater interest than before in biography, autobiography and fiction.

Each of us embarks on a journey outward into the world and inward into the self. We are, as Durkheim (1965 [1912]) said, at once collective and individual. Society is mysterious to us because we have lived in it and it now dwells inside us at a level that is not ordinarily visible from the perspective of everyday life. Writing is one way we try to bring the two into some mutual understanding that we can share with others. Ethnographic fieldwork, requiring us to participate in local society as we observe it, adds to our range of social experience and brings lived society into our sources of introspection. One method for understanding world society would then be to make an ongoing practice of trying to synthesize these varied experiences. This is to some extent what I attempted in The Memory Bank (Hart, 2000).

I asked there what future generations would consider distinctive of our times and came up with the digital revolution in communications, manifested as the rise of the internet in the 1990s. The half-century begun by the anti-colonial revolution had seen the formation of world society as a single interactive network. How was the digital revolution affecting the forms of money and exchange? I concluded that the impersonal conditions of personal economic agency were shifting in profound ways (see also Hart, 2005).

I had previously written a draft of a text-book showing how anthropologists can and do address the economic institutions of modern society. But I rejected this effort because it was too impersonal. I could not identify myself in it. I based the successor volume on personal memory – on my own teaching and research over three decades and especially on my own encounters with the economy as a gambler, journalist, consultant, publisher and academic entrepreneur. The idea of a memory bank comes from computing; but banks are also where money is kept. I came to see that the two great memory banks, language and money, were converging as information in the internet; and of course the book itself was my memory bank. Soon afterwards I developed this website for the diffusion of my writings under the same name.

There are as many worlds as there are individuals and their journeys. This could be our starting point; but it will not do for the study of world society. For this anthropologists need to enter the objective world of money, markets, digital communications, ecology, cities, population statistics, trading blocs, nation-states, corporations, networks and war, all the while risking exposure of our professional naivety. Making a better society also means using the imagination for purposes of fiction, the construction of possible worlds out of actual experience. Thinking about the macrocosm is made easier through contemplation of microcosms. Novels and movies compress the world into a narrow format that we enter subjectively on our own terms, allowing us to make a meaningful connection with history. In the past, human universals have sought to extinguish or dominate the cultural particulars through which human beings live. The principle of the new universal is, I believe, already revealed to us in great literature. It is that human universals must not just tolerate cultural particulars, but can only be realized through them. Thus, the most creative writers reach general truths by digging deeply into particular places and personalities. This has always been the great strength of ethnography.

The success of British social anthropology in the interwar period derived from the unity of its object, theory and method (Hart, 2004). The object was “primitive societies”, far-flung peoples of the empire encountered in the here and now. The theory was “functionalism”, the idea that customary practices, however bizarre, make sense and fit together, since daily life would be impossible otherwise. And the method, as their successors repeat in an unchanging mantra, was “fieldwork-based ethnography”, joining people where they live to find out what they do and think, then writing it up in universities back home. Even if I consider that anthropology has one ultimate object (to study and help create world society), I have been compelled to make a virtue of being methodologically and theoretically eclectic. Like many of my contemporaries, I have been drawn into the long struggle to reinvent our discipline in the face of post-colonial realities. Studying money has become for me the object and means of this re-invention.

The anthropology of money: some themes

(a) The meaning of money

The word money comes from Moneta, whose temple in Rome was their mint. Moneta was the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Her name was derived from the Latin verb moneo whose first meaning is “to remind, bring to one’s recollection”. For the Romans, money was an instrument of collective memory that needed divine protection, like the arts. It was both a memento of the past and a sign of the future.

Money’s prime function could thus be said to help us keep track of those exchanges we wish to calculate. But a lot more circulates by means of money than what it buys. Money conveys meanings and these tell us a lot about the way human beings make communities. Money expresses both individual desires and the way we belong to each other. In this it resembles language, the other great means of communication (Hart, 2007b). How do meanings come to be shared and memory to transcend the minutiae of personal experience? Memory was central to Locke’s philosophy of money (Caffentzis, 1989 : 53). For him property belonged to a person who made it his own by performing labour on what nature gave humanity in common. But for a claim on property to endure, that person has to remain the same; and this depends on memory. So money helps us to stabilize personal identity by holding something that embodies the desires and wealth of all.

Communities exist by virtue of their members’ ability to exchange meanings that are substantially shared between them. People must understand each other for practical purposes. And that is why communities operate through culture (meanings held in common). Money is an important vehicle for this collective sharing as well as for the differentiation of individuals by wealth and status.

Communities operate through implicit rules (customs) rather than state-made laws. In the nineteenth century, few believed that the state, an archaic institution of agrarian civilization, could govern the restless energies of urban commercial society. Accordingly, “primitive” communities were studied to throw light on the task of building modern societies along democratic lines. After the First World War, the modern state was seen as inevitable and small-scale alternatives became irrelevant. But now large states are in disarray. The word is out for devolution to less rigidly organized “communities”. Market networks seem to offer more direct access to the world at large. Cheap information allows relations at distance to be made more personal. So we have to rethink how societies can best be organized for their development.

The meaning of money is that each of us makes it, separately and together (Hart, 2006). It is a symbol of our individual relationship to the community. This relationship may be conceived of much as in existing states — as a durable ground on which to stand, anchoring identity in a collective memory whose concrete symbol is money. Or it may be viewed as a more creative process, allowing each of us to generate personal credit linking us to multiple forms of association. But few people are ready to accept that society rests on nothing more solid than our transient exchanges.

(b) Money as idea and object

Keynes (1930) held, against the myth that traces money to the barter of commodities by savages, that states invented money. He distinguished how purchasing power is expressed (“money-of-account”) from the currency that is actually held (“money-proper”, what Dodd (2005) calls “the monetary medium”). These are money’s insubstantial and substantial forms, respectively. It was thus always both an idea and an object; we might say, virtual and real. The convenience of using money for exchange on the spot seemed to Keynes less important than the emergence of a money standard named by law. Moreover, the acknowledgment of private debts (“bank money”) has long been used to settle transactions expressed through the money of account.

Modern state money is currency of little or no worth offered to a people by their government in payment for real goods and services, with the obligation to pay taxes on all transactions using the sole legal means of exchange within the territory. Central banks jealously guard the national monopoly, policing the banks who actually issue most of the money. Most currencies today are a hybrid between commodity-money (based on gold for example) and fiat-money (paper money). From the beginning, states and markets were symbiotic. Rulers needed the revenues from taxation of trade and some imported commodities as symbols of power; merchants needed the protection of law and the establishment of a public standard. Each excluded the possibility of society being conceived of as persons belonging to particular communities.

(c) Heads or tails?

The coin has two sides (Hart, 1986). One contains a symbol of political authority (heads); the other tells us its quantitative value in exchange for other commodities (tails). The two sides are related to each other as top to bottom. One carries the virtual authority of the state; it is a token of society, the money of account. The other says that money proper is itself a commodity, lending precision to trade; it is a real thing.

Victorian civilization based its market economy on money as a commodity, gold. For much of the twentieth century, under Keynes’s influence, political management of money was normal. Now there is talk again of “the markets” reigning supreme and of states losing control over national currencies in a process of globalization. Yet the evidence of our coinage is that states and markets are or were each indispensable to money. What states and markets share is a commitment to founding the economy on impersonal money. If you drop a coin and someone else picks it up, they can do exactly the same with it. This absence of personal information from the currency is what recommends cash to people who prefer their transactions to be invisible. But economic democracy requires people to participate in exchange as themselves, not just as the anonymous bearers of cash.

What if money came from the people instead (Hart, 2006)? The German romantic, Adam Müller (1931 [1816]) thought money expressed the accumulated customs of a nation (Volk); while Simmel (1978 [1900]) and Mauss (1990 [1925]) conceived of money as an expression of trust within civil society, locating value in personal management of credit and debt. In the age of digital communications, other possibilities present themselves. If money is a measure of transactions, it might even become more meaningful than it has been of late.

(d) People’s money

The bureaucratic power of states rests on coercion. Revenue collection, both public and private, depends on the authorities being able to force people to pay through the threat of punishment; and territorial monopoly is indispensable to both. This, for all their conflicts of interest, underlies the continuing alliance between large corporations and national governments. Will borderless trade at the speed of light permit governments and corporations still to compel payment of their dues? Contemporary conflicts over intellectual property hinge on this question (Hart, 2005).

How might public economies be organized without effective means of coercing payment? Some Swiss cantons have recently released their stock exchanges from government supervision, because the threat to punish offenders was idle. Exchanges were asked to draw up their own rules with the sole sanction being to exclude transgressors. With the erosion of territorial power, people will have to turn to more informal means of regulation within their own forms of association. The forms of money and exchange are likely to be no exception.

Modern bureaucracy, as embodied in law, markets and science, has undermined the meaningful attachment of persons to the social order. So, when bureaucracy fails, the means of personal connection will have to be reinvented. There are many antecedents for building communities on the basis of individual members’ moral and religious commitment. The growth of NGOs financed by charitable donations supports this point. Mauss (1990 [1925]) was far-sighted when he traced the origin of the modern economy to the gift, rather than to barter.

Mauss’s emphasis is consistent with the idea of money as personal credit, linked less to the history of state coinage than to the acknowledgement of private debt. Our need to keep track of proliferating connections with others is mediated by money as a means of collective memory. People will increasingly enter circuits of exchange based on special currencies. At the other extreme, we participate as individuals in global markets of infinite scope, using international moneys of account (such as the euro), electronic payment systems of various sorts or even direct barter via the internet.

It is a world whose plurality of association will resemble feudalism more than the Roman Empire. In such a world, one currency cannot possibly meet all the needs of a diversified region’s inhabitants. The shift to ever more intangible versions of currency — from metals to paper to bits — has exposed the limitations of central bank monopolies. In response, people have already started generating their own money in the form of a variety of community currencies often using sophisticated electronic payment systems (Hart, 2006).

Even when they don’t issue their own money instruments, people do make their own social uses of it. Zelizer (1994; 2005) argues that monetary flows are best approached through understanding the social practices of ordinary people. This too is the dominant perspective of Parry and Bloch’s collection, Money and the Morality of Exchange (1989). The anthropology of money must build on this perspective, since economic democracy has its origin in such practices. But I have been concerned mainly with the prospects for people to make money rather than take it for their own ends.

Commoditization: the dialectics of social abstraction

One common strand informing these several lines of inquiry into money has been Marx’s analysis of the historical relationship between people, machines and money in Capital. People ought to control machines and through them money, to be distributed in the general interest; but it is the other way round — money controls the machines and the people, with unequal and often socially disastrous results. Our political task is to reverse this situation. His book was a means to that end and he began it with the famous chapter on “commodities” which deserves our close attention, especially the opening section : “The two factors of a commodity: use-value and value (the substance of value and the magnitude of value)” (Marx 1970 [1867] : 35-41).

Marx defines the commodity as a useful product of labour which, by means of social abstraction, is endowed with value in exchange. In an earlier article (Hart, 1982), I sought to improve on this definition, first by making the historical dialectic more explicit and then by taking up developments since Marx’s time. I recast the commodity as a process, “commoditization”, defined as “the progressive abstraction of social labour”. When we do things for each other in society, these services have to be detached from what we do for ourselves. This process of abstraction draws us into ever-widening circles of interdependence, the most inclusive of which are exchanges using money.

The commodity is progressively (but not necessarily in a historical sequence):

Some useful thing external to the producer;
Made social by becoming available to outsiders;
Specialization extends exchange to an inter-community level;
Sometimes persons circulate, not things (e.g. marriage exchange);
Products of socially divided labour are circulated by means of gift-exchange, barter or payments of rent;
This may be elaborated as markets, exchange at negotiated rates, not the gift;
Then special- and general-purpose monies enter into the circuit of exchange;
Money is the commodity crystallized as pure exchange value (Marx);
Now money can take the form of capital to make profit;
Eventually “industrial capital” employs human labour, as opposed to finance and merchant capital;
Passing beyond Marx’s time, services come to outweigh goods in the world market (things are replaced by what people do for each other);
Now commodities are often ideas and work for society is recognized through wholly abstract ciphers; money is information flying around cyberspace as bits;
The world market for money is dominated by derivatives – secondary contracts that gamble on the future prices of commodities actually bought and sold;
But people still do many things for themselves; make gifts; use old-fashioned cash; join computerized barter networks etc.

This is, of course, a bourgeois just-so story; and it has been thrown into question again by the recent collapse of the utopian attempt to separate finance from the real economy and politics. But it is based on Marx’s and it does illuminate a basic trend that he predicted, the apotheosis of capital as money exchanged for money in a pure form detached from what people do. It is consistent with Mauss’s (1990 [1925]) argument that gift-exchange and market contracts rest on a shared logic of reciprocity; but not with the opposition between “gift economies” and “commodity economies” that animates so much anthropological discussion today (Gregory, 1982; 1997 : chapter 2; Hart, 2007a).

In his introduction to Grundrisse (1973 [1859]:100-108), Marx states that we must start from the concrete conditions of our moment in history and then draw some analytical abstractions from them. Some are content just to achieve abstract ideas; but for Marx the point is to insert these simplified abstractions back into their concrete starting-point. Yet he opens Capital with this abstract discourse on “commodities” and the three volumes never get to where he was aiming for in Grundrisse, “the world market and its crises”.

Both Marx (1970 [1867]) and Simmel (1978 [1900] : chapter 6) noticed that social abstraction through capitalist markets seemed to go along with intellectual abstraction as philosophy and science in ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, England in the seventeenth century and, we might say, the USA in the twentieth. But we should not lose sight of the dialectics involved. The commodity remains something useful and in that use lies its concrete realization. The reality is the mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete and our method has somehow to reproduce that.

We rely on the products of abstraction to engage with others in highly concrete ways; and information-based trade in commodities and money allows us to interact with increasing specificity at great distances. Thus I once had a service contract for my website with a firm in Bangalore, India. I could talk to the webmaster there by internet telephone, while he showed me various design possibilities through our browsers– all in real time and at no cost. This is getting close to what we could do to if we were in the same room together. Working with a PC will be a lot less lonely in future.

The digital revolution in communications is as radical as any in human history, comparable to the invention of agriculture (Hart, 2000, 2005). The internet went public less than two decades ago and its basic technologies were invented in the context of the second world war. We are like the first digging-stick operators who stumbled into a revolution whose culmination thousands of years later in Chinese agrarian civilization was unimaginable to them.

A case study: the euro

The euro is, with the US dollar, an example of the “homogenization” of money in recent times, the tendency for currencies to become more alike and for national currencies to take shelter with a global one (Dodd, 2005). As a very recent experiment, it lost 20% of its value against the dollar when it was only virtual (money of account), regaining more than that after its launch as notes and coins (monetary medium), only to slide back in 2005 and recover in 2006, since when its strength against a weakening dollar may have jeopardized its manufacturing exports. With the dollar’s role as world currency coming under pressure, the euro offers one of the few alternative refuges for the free flow of capital worldwide.

The European Union is the most dynamic political experiment in the world, with its rapid enlargement giving rise to intense debate over economic policy. The French and Dutch rejection of the new constitution revealed a popular concern that European governance is too remote, elitist and bureaucratic. I see the European project as an antidote to reactionary nationalism; but it could surely do with being more flexible and accountable. The “no” votes highlighted the issue of Europe’s “social model”, specifically of its ability to withstand the neo-liberal world economy. The monetary union agreed at Maastricht is too rigid and the Dutch in particular found they had imported inflation with the euro, partly because the governments of larger countries overspent their limits to shore up depressed economies. Some Italians, faced with Asian competition for their manufactures, now express nostalgia for lira devaluation.

As European and American foreign policy have diverged since the end of the Cold War, this has led to growing public discussion of their respective economic models. Market liberals see only decadence in Europe and a euro that was a dead duck before it even got started. Some American radicals, on the other hand, claim that Bush invaded Iraq because Saddam was switching his oil money into euros. In the meantime, no-one knows how long Japan and China will finance the USA’s trade and budget deficits nor what will happen to the world economy if they sell off their dollars. The rise of the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as producers of agriculture, minerals, manufactures and information services is the biggest shift in global capitalism since the USA and Germany challenged Britain’s commercial ascendancy a century ago. A focus on the euro is a way of simplifying this complex situation. That is after all one of money’s principal functions. So is the euro a new form of money and what difference has it made so far?

An editorial in Libération, of 1^st January 2002, celebrated the euro as a revival of the spirit of the Roman Empire under the heading “Rubicon”:

La marche de César sur Rome fut l’acte fondateur d’une Pax romana qui étendit son empire plusieurs siècles durant d’un bout à l’autre de l’Europe, garantissant au continent prospérité et civilisation. Les Européens n’ont jamais tout à fait perdu le souvenir de cet âge d’or….L’euro, véritable icône de l’Union européenne, est une nouvelle réincarnation de l’éternel projet d’unité d’un vieux continent hanté par sa longue histoire de conflits sanglants… (p. 3)

Moneta returns to claim her cultural legacy and a newspaper of the left temporarily abandons its republicanism to invoke the idea of empire. If money is memory, then the euro provokes very long memories indeed, as well as a degree of amnesia. Whatever we may think of Rome’s political system, the promise of overcoming the fragmentation of European sovereignty inherited from feudalism is indeed the huge symbolic prize conferred by monetary union. The EU is a community, not a state; and its founding principle of “subsidiarity” ensures that there is room for many levels of community underneath. Ironically, by suppressing their own national currencies, some countries may encourage the formation of parallel exchange circuits, employing virtual deutschmarks or francs as community currencies. There is scope for less inclusive monetary instruments to complement the euro. After all, the identity of the French is hardly erased by a currency that crosses borders.

Has the euro made any difference to the personal memory of individual Europeans? Their travels between member countries have been simplified, but not much else has changed. In most respects the system of banking remains the same and this reflects the conservatism of Maastricht and of the European central bank it eventually created.

The technical form of money is becoming ever more insubstantial — from precious metals and ledger entries to paper notes and electronic digits. In the process money is revealed as pure information and its function as an accounting device (money of account) takes precedence over its form as circulating objects (the monetary medium). The euro began life in a wholly virtual form, without an objective existence as currency. Since money futures markets were invented in 1975, international exchanges of money no longer mainly pay for traded goods and services, but rather consist of money being exchanged for money in another form. In this way the money circuit (known as “the markets”) has become almost wholly detached from real production, trade and political management.

In this world of runaway intangibles, the arrival of the euro notes and coins in January 2000 had a tangible objectivity. The banks of course still create over 90% of all euros in the form of paper loans (or more often as bits in cyberspace), but the actual currency was seen to be a symbol of a new political era. Almost all suppliers took advantage of the switch to round prices upwards. Otherwise, since the participating national currencies had been linked together within EMU for a decade, the euro has made little difference to people’s experience of money either as an idea or as an object.

What about “heads or tails”? Has the euro altered the balance between states and markets? The euro may not be a national currency, but it does aim to be federal, like the dollar, and the participating countries represent in effect a league of states. Joining a larger currency bloc is a way of trying to cope with “the markets” — the global tide of virtual money that threatens to swamp the independence of national economies. But the euro is still a form of state money and its management is likely to be even less democratically accountable to the public than its national precursors. The euro is in principle a throwback to the Bretton Woods era of fixed parity exchange rates; and it does not take much imagination to figure out that some parts of the European economy will suffer from its rigidity. The plight of countries like Ireland, Spain and Austria after the “credit crunch”, specifically their inability to devalue with th efreedom enjoyed by Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, confrms this hypothesis. At least the euro coins have generally dispensed with the heads of rulers.

The economic destiny of 300 million Europeans is now tied to the fortunes of a single currency whose management cannot possibly meet their varied needs and interests and whose political form is unwieldy enough to retard effective action in a crisis. If government of modern societies from a fixed central point has always been anomalous, this is even more true of Europe as I write now. Its constituent states will come under pressure from their own people for more flexible instruments of economic management. The euro cannot do the job all by itself. National monopolies of money have in any case only been around since the 1850s. Now would be a good time to recognize the need for a variety of monetary instruments, for as many in fact as our communities.

Is the euro a step towards money that better reflects the interests of people in general? The technical forms of currency are relatively insignificant — notes, coins, cheques, ledgers, plastic, digits — and the euro embraces them all. The form of the money of account is more important and, after several thousand years of state money linked to markets for scarce commodities (Keynes, 1930), it will take some effort to embrace another form, people’s money. Territorial states are an anachronism today. Digitization encourages a growing separation between society and landed power. The euro involves only a limited break with the territorial principle. Its logic is still that of a central bank monopoly within an expanded territory. The national governments of Euroland are likely to be more constrained in their ability to raise taxes beyond the norm for the region. And of course, travellers throughout Europe will be less subject than before to usurious exchange rates. But against this, the management of the European economy from a single fixed point will impose costs on regions ill-suited by the common monetary policy. And it is still the case that people will finance governments and the banks through the imposition of a monopoly currency as sole legal tender.

There are other democratic possibilities. We can make our own money rather than pay for the privilege of receiving it from our rulers (Hart, 2006). Already social experiments involving community currencies are breaking new ground, thanks to the possibilities inherent in the new information technologies. The next chapter of monetary history will be written by new approaches addressing the parts that the euro alone cannot reach. But the euro itself will probably be with us, well, for as long as European people think of themselves as a community for some purposes. This project has been severely strained by the financial (subsequently general economic) crisis of 2008-9 which has brutally exposed not only the gap between East and West Europe, but also the vulnerability of countries like Spain and Ireland to dependence on the European Central Bank’s management of a single currency, a role that increasingly looks to reflect Germany’s interests as the dominant member. Meanwhile the euro’s movement through our turbulent world offers us a glimpse of where human society is heading – perhaps to a totalitarian and fragmented future, even to world war, but just possibly also towards greater economic democracy and human unity.

Conclusion: money and the making of world society

The euro is the most tangible symbol of the European Union, but not co-extensive with it. For the last century or more, member states had supplied their citizens with a monopoly currency that served both as the reification of the national economy and as their principle link to the world market. The move towards political and monetary union in Europe is the most striking example of a general trend. Everywhere nation-states are coming together into regional trading blocs as one kind of response to globalization: NAFTA, Mercosul, ASEAN, ECOWAS etc. At the same time, many states have hitched their waggon to the sinking dollar. In the meantime, the sheer size and volatility of global money markets and internet commerce undermine the credibility of existing national polities as an effective bridge to world society. The international settlement after 1945 looks increasingly inadequate. Before long, calls for a world currency will become louder than at present (Frankman, 2004).

Money is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity (Hart, 2000). If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends finality to your choice. Money thus links us imaginatively and practically to the widest reaches of society, while lending precision to the fulfillment of our most concrete desires and obligations. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination.

If the object of anthropology is to become the making of world society, the substantial intellectual gains made by ethnography in the twentieth century must be married somehow to humanistic, historical and philosophical inquiries adequate to the task. The study of money offers one strategic focus for this, since money, more than most institutions, links each of us directly with the humanity’s potential to make universal society.

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Mauss, M., 1990 [1925] : The Gift : the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies, London, Routledge.

Müller, A,  1931 [1816] : Elemente der Staatskunst : Theorie des Geldes, Leipzig, Kröne.

Parry, J. and Bloch, M. (Eds), 1989 : Money and the Morality of Exchange, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P.

Popper, K., 1997 : The Myth of the Framework, London, Routledge.

Simmel, G., 1978 [1900] : The Philosophy of Money, London, Routledge.

Zelizer, V., 1994 : The Social Meaning of Money, New York, Basic Books.

2005 : “Missing money: comment on Nigel Dodd” (above), Economy and Society, 34 (4) : 584-588.

First published in E. Baumann, L. Bazin, P. Ould-Ahmed, P. Phélinas, M. Selim, R. Sobel (éds)
Argent des anthropologues, monnaie des economistes (Harmattan, Paris, 2007)

1. Humanity is caught between national and world society. This is both dangerous and an opportunity for us. Yet much of what has been presented here has assumed that we can safely talk about the United States in isolation from the rest of the world.

2. Everything we have heard today has been impersonal and this will not do. People want to relate impersonal knowledge to their personal lives. And this relationship between the personal and impersonal aspects of social life is being radically changed by the digital revolution in communications, as manifested in the internet.

3. I want to offer a vision of money’s role in our lives that emphasizes its redemptive qualities as perhaps the principal means of mediating our relations with impersonal society in ways that can be personally meaningful.

4. The dominant social form over the last 150 years has been ‘national capitalism’. Any future we contemplate beyond the current crisis must take into account its history which I will present as a story of rise and fall in five stages.

5. Towards the end national capitalism resembled nothing so much an ‘Old Regime’, that arbitrary version of unequal society which was overthrown by the American and French revolutions. More accurately, I would say that the world society constituted by national capitalism as the dominant form manifested an obscene inequality and lawlessness characteristic of the Old Regime.

We are asked to re-imagine the economy. But what is THE economy? Where is it? The economy, when unqualified, is normally assumed to be national, but what we have to imagine is a genuinely world economy and all the levels underneath. I believe that we are at the end of something and the beginning of something new. In order to re-imagine the future, we have to re-imagine the past. What is it that is ending and what is its history?

The dominant social form of the last 150 years has been the nation-state formed through an alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class whose defeat was the principal aim of classical political economy. It was an alliance between big money and specialists in crowd control. They came together in a linked series of national revolutions in the 1860s, spilling over into the next decade, in order to secure industrial capitalism and the nation-state from the threat of the urban masses. These were the American civil war, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, Italy’s Risorgimento, Japan’s Meiji restoration, Britain’s second Reform Act and the formation of the Anglo-Indian superstate, German unification, the Franco-Prussian war and the French Third Republic. All of these moves by the main players in twentieth century history established a political framework capable of subduing and mobilizing people by a combination of capital, violence and the appeal to cultural unity. I call it national capitalism, the attempt to manage money and markets through central bureaucracy; but this has always been in dialectical tension with financial imperialism, a force for globalization that flourished for three decades before WW1 and for the last three decades, with disastrous consequences in the first instance and potentially for us too.

I should first indicate briefly my own approach to money. The economists understand money and markets exclusively through impersonal models, so anthropologists and sociologists have focused on how people make money personal and concretely social. But the economy exists at more inclusive levels than the person, the family or local groups. This is made possible by the impersonality of money and markets, where economists remain largely unchallenged. Money is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. As a token of society, money must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

If the proliferation of personal credit today could be seen as a step towards greater humanism in economy, this also entails increased dependence on impersonal governments and corporations, on impersonal abstraction of the sort associated with computing operations and on impersonal standards and social guarantees for contractual exchange. If persons are to make a comeback in the post-modern economy, it will be less on a face-to-face basis than as bits on a screen who sometimes materialize as living people in the present. We may become less weighed down by money as an objective force, more open to the idea that it is a way of keeping track of complex social networks that we each generate. Then money could take a variety of forms compatible with both personal agency and human interdependence at every level from the local to the global.

The reality of markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. To turn our backs on markets and money in the name of collective as opposed to individual interests reproduces by negation the bourgeois separation of self and society. It is not enough to emphasize the controls that people already impose on money and exchange as part of their personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts of the macro-economy that we don’t know, if we wish to avert the ruin they could bring down on us all. This was what Simmel had in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

National capitalism has been the principal cause of our alienation from money and society as unreachable social objects, since it concentrates agency in remote centres of power that leave most people without a meaningful link to the forces changing society. It has evolved through five historical phases:

1. 1860s and 70s: its formation in a series of political and technological revolutions. The latter included steamships, continental railways and the telegraph.

2. 1880s to 1914: financial imperialism; globalization 1; bureaucratic revolution; the installation of the uneasy alliance between states and corporations that we call public and private sectors.

3. 1914-45: the second 30 years war (Churchill); an unmitigated catastrophe; wars and economic disaster.

4. 1945-70s: the social democratic consensus; the ‘golden age’ of national capitalism (Hobsbawm); the nuclear terror of the Cold War; the anti-colonial revolution and civil rights.

5. 1980s-now: neoliberalism beginning with Reagan and Thatcher, dismantling of the postwar class compromise; globalization 2. I claim that this was the period when world society was formed as a single interactive social network for the first time. It was fragile and highly unequal, but it hinged on three developments: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, opening up the whole world to transnational capitalism; the rise of China and India’s two billion people as economic powers in their own right; the shortening of time and distance through the internet.

The alliance of states and corporation came to resemble the Old Regime, especially when George Bush II and Halliburton acted as if they were George III and the East India Company. If national capitalism became near the end an increasingly arbitrary engine of inequality at the global level, what are the prospects for a world revolution now?

The forces of impersonal society have been weakened. This is true of large-scale private capital, especially the banks, and of the dominant free market ideology (economics, at least in the world outside Chicago!). This had led temporarily to reliance on the powers of government held by the leading states, in self-conscious evocation of a Keynesian past. But the national solutions of the 30s will not work this time; and states are compromised by their ties to the corporations. Their methods are ineffective and will fail, thereby discrediting the second leg of national capitalism. Our main problem is to locate the combination of political forms and levels of association that are adequate to address this crisis.

We need to identify the social forces that have been building up in this last phase and that may take advantage of the Old Regime’s collapse.

1. The shift in economic power West to East (North to South?) has undermined North Atlantic hegemony; but this may merely serve as an opportunity for China, India, Russia and Brazil to revive national capitalism on their own terms.

2. The recent rise of trading blocs (EU, NAFTA, ASEAN, Mercosul) introduces a new regional and federal principle to world political economy. It will be a major contribution to global democracy if Africa, drawing on a tradition of Panafricanism, can form its own regional association.

3. I have focused in my own research on the potential for enhancing personal society through the internet, social networking, open source methods and so on. The dominant fact of our epoch is the radical cheapening of the cost of transferring information, making it possible to add lots of personal information to transactions at distance. There is much more to be said about this.

4. This is related to the possibilities for open money to flourish at the expense of the conventional banking system. Again I have explored community currencies at some length, drawing on the experience and ideas of Michael Linton and his associates.

5. The global institutions of late 1940s need to be replaced by new ones, even perhaps by a world government. Some may argue that the advent of Obama opens up a more progressive phase of international politics, but substantial reform, as Kant suggested when he said that conflict is the precondition for a more lawful world, is likely only after a prolonged breakdown of the peace. Must we go through another thirty years war in order to revive the impetus of the 1940s? My fear is that the closest historical analogy for our dilemmas is not 1933, but 1913, when globalization 1 broke down after three decades of financial imperialism.

There is an enduring tension between the closure of territorial rule and the universality of money. This has been magnified by the dominance of impersonal society in national capitalism. The forces for a democratic alternative, based on more directly personal relations to society, have been building up for decades and now face much weaker opposition from the Old Regime. I do not say a new liberal revolution will succeed; but I know which side I am on.

Talk given at the Financial Crisis Conference, University of Chicago, 10th April 2009, panel After the crisis: re-imagining the economy with Eugene Fama and James Galbraith, chair/discussant Moishe Postone.

Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half of the twentieth century, humanity formed a world society – a single interactive social network – for the first time. This was symbolized by several moments, such as when the space race of the 60s allowed us to see the earth from the outside or when the internet went public in the 90s, announcing the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital revolution of communications. Our world too is massively unequal and the voices for human unity are often drowned. But if the twenty-first century is run on the same lines as the twentieth century, there will be no twenty-second. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. I will explore here the possible contribution of anthropology to such a project. If the academic discipline as presently constituted would find it hard to address this task, perhaps we need to look elsewhere for a suitable intellectual strategy. 

Kant’s Anthropology

Immanuel Kant published Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view in 1798. The book was based on lectures he had given at the university since 1772-3. Kant’s aim was to attract the general public to an independent discipline whose name he more than anyone contributed to academic life. Remarkably, histories of anthropology have rarely mentioned this work, perhaps because the discipline has evolved so far away from Kant’s original premises. But it would pay us to take his Anthropology seriously, if only for its resonance with our own times.

Shortly before, Kant wrote Perpetual peace: a philosophical sketch. The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw its own share of ‘globalization’ — the American and French revolutions, the rise of British industry and the international movement to abolish slavery. Kant knew that coalitions of states were gearing up for war, yet he responded to this sense of the world coming closer together by proposing how humanity might form society as world citizens beyond the boundaries of states. He held that ‘cosmopolitan right’, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, on the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory. In other words, we should be free to go wherever we like in the world, since it belongs to all of us equally. He goes on to say:

The peoples of the earth have entered in varying degree into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity.

This confident sense of an emergent world order, written over 200 years ago, can now be seen as the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation-state.

Earlier Kant wrote an essay, ‘Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose’ which included the following propositions:

1. In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural faculties which aim at the use of reason shall be fully developed in the species, not in the individual.

2. The means that nature employs to accomplish the development of all faculties is the antagonism of men in society, since this antagonism becomes, in the end, the cause of a lawful order of this society.

3. The latest problem for mankind, the solution of which nature forces us to seek, is the achievement of a civil society which is capable of administering law universally.

4. This problem is both the most difficult and the last to be solved by mankind.

5. A philosophical attempt to write a universal world history according to a plan of nature which aims at perfect civic association of mankind must be considered to be possible and even as capable of furthering nature’s purpose.

Our world is much more socially integrated than two centuries ago and its economy is palpably unequal. Histories of the universe we inhabit do seem to be indispensable to the construction of institutions capable of administering justice worldwide. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century, even a world state, is an urgent one and anthropological visions should play their part in that.

This then was the context for the publication of Kant’s Anthropology. He elsewhere summarized ‘philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word’ as four questions:

What can I know?

What should I do?

What may I hope for?

What is a human being?

The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology.

But the first three questions ‘relate to anthropology’, he said, and might be subsumed under it. Kant conceived of anthropology as an empirical discipline, but also as a means of moral and cultural improvement. It was thus both an investigation into human nature and, more especially, into how to modify it, as a way of providing his students with practical guidance and knowledge of the world. He intended his lectures to be ‘popular’ and of value in later life. Above all, the Anthropology was to contribute to the progressive political task of uniting world citizens by identifying the source of their ‘cosmopolitan bonds’. The book thus moves between mundane illustrations and Kant’s most sublime vision, using anecdotes close to home as a bridge to horizon thinking.

If for Kant the two divisions of anthropology were physiological and pragmatic, he preferred to concentrate on the latter — ‘what the human being as a free actor can and should make of himself’. This is based primarily on observation, but it also involves the construction of moral rules. The book has two parts, the first and longer being on empirical psychology and divided into sections on cognition, aesthetics and ethics. Part 2 is concerned with the character of human beings at every level from the individual to the species, seen from both the inside and the outside. Anthropology is the practical arm of moral philosophy. It does not explain the metaphysics of morals which are categorical and transcendent; but it is indispensable to any interaction involving human agents. It is thus ‘pragmatic’ in a number of senses: it is ‘everything that pertains to the practical’, popular (as opposed to academic) and moral in that it is concerned with what people should do, with their motives for action.

In his Preface, Kant acknowledges that anthropological science has some way to go methodologically. People act self-consciously when they are being observed and it is often hard to distinguish between self-conscious action and habit. For this reason, he recommends as aids ‘world history, biographies and even plays and novels’. The latter, while being admittedly inventions, are often based on close observation of real behaviour and add to our knowledge of human beings. He thought that the main value of his book lay in its systematic organization, so that readers could incorporate their experience into it and develop new themes appropriate to their own lives. Historians and philosophers are divided between those who find the book marginal to Kant’s thought and those for whom it is just muddled and banal. And the anthropologists have ignored it entirely. I hope to show that this was a mistake.

The anthropology of unequal society

Following Locke’s example, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was animated by a revolutionary desire to found democratic societies to replace the class system typical of agrarian civilization. How could the arbitrary social inequality of the Old Regime be abolished and a more equal society founded on the basis of what all people have in common, their human nature? The great Victorian synthesizers, such as Morgan, Engels, Tylor and Frazer, were standing on the shoulders of Enlightenment predecessors motivated by a pressing democratic project to make world society less unequal. Seen in this light, the first work of modern anthropology is not Kant’s, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754).

Here Rousseau was concerned not with individual variations in natural endowments which we can do little about, but with the artificial inequalities of wealth, honour and the capacity to command obedience derived from social convention which can be changed. In order to construct a model of human equality, he imagined a pre-social state of nature, a sort of hominid phase of human evolution in which men were solitary, but healthy, happy and above all free. This freedom was metaphysical, anarchic and personal: original human beings had free will, they were not subject to rules of any kind and they had no superiors. At some point humanity made the transition to what Rousseau calls ‘nascent society’, a prolonged period whose economic base can best be summarized as hunter-gathering with huts. This second phase represents his ideal of life in society close to nature.

The rot set in with the invention of agriculture or, as Rousseau puts it, of wheat and iron. Cultivation of the land led to incipient property institutions whose culmination awaited the development of political society.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

The formation of a civil order (the state) was preceded by a Hobbesian condition, a war of all against all marked by the absence of law, which Rousseau insisted was the result of social development, not an original state of nature. He believed that this new social contract was probably arrived at by consensus, but it was a fraudulent one in that the rich thereby gained legal sanction for transmitting unequal property rights in perpetuity. From this inauspicious beginning, political society then usually moved, via a series of revolutions, through three stages:

The establishment of law and the right of property was the first stage, the institution of magistrates the second, and the transformation of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last stage. Thus the status of rich and poor was authorized by the first epoch, that of strong and weak by the second and by the third that of master and slave, which is the last degree of inequality and the stage to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether and bring it back to legitimacy.

One-man-rule closes the circle.

It is here that all individuals become equal again because they are nothing, here where subjects have no longer any law but the will of the master…

For Rousseau, the growth of inequality was just one aspect of human alienation in civil society. We need to return from division of labour and dependence on the opinion of others to subjective self-sufficiency, Kant’s principal concern and mine. This subversive parable ends with a ringing indictment of economic inequality which could well serve as a warning to our world.

It is manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined… that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities.

Lewis H. Morgan drew on Rousseau’s model for his own fiercely democratic synthesis of human history, Ancient Society. If Rousseau laid out the first systematic anthropological theory and Kant then proposed anthropology as an academic discipline, what made Morgan’s work the launch proper of modern anthropology was his ability to enroll contemporary ethnographic observations made among the Iroquois into analysis of the historical structures underlying western civilization’s origins in Greece and Rome. Marx and Engels enthusiastically took up Morgan’s work as confirmation of their own critique of the state and capitalism; and the latter, drawing on Marx’s extensive annotations of Ancient Society, made the argument more accessible as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels’s greater emphasis on gender inequality made this strand of ‘the anthropology of unequal society’ a fertile source for the feminist movement in the 1960s and after.

The traditional home of inequality is supposed to be India and Andre Beteille (e.g. Inequality among men) has made the subject his special domain of late, merging social anthropology with comparative sociology. In the United States, Leslie White at Michigan and Julian Steward at Columbia led teams, including Wolf, Sahlins, Service, Harris and Mintz, who took the evolution of the state and class society as their chief focus. Probably the single most impressive work coming out of this American school was Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History. But one man tried to redo Morgan in a single book and that was Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship. We should recall that, in Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss acknowledged Rousseau as his master. The aim of Elementary Structures was to revisit Morgan’s three-stage theory of social evolution, drawing on a new and impressive canvas, ‘the Siberia-Assam axis’ and all points southeast as far as the Australian desert. Lévi-Strauss took as his motor of development the forms of marriage exchange and the logic of exogamy. The ‘restricted reciprocity’ of egalitarian bands gave way to the unstable hierarchies of ‘generalized reciprocity’ typical of the Highland Burma tribes. The stratified states of the region turned inwards to endogamy, to the reproduction of class differences and the negation of social reciprocity. Evidently, the author was not encouraged to universalize the model, since he subsequently abandoned it, preferring to analyze the structures of the human mind as revealed in myths.

My teacher, Jack Goody has tried to lift our profession out of a myopic ethnography into a concern with the movement of world history that went out of fashion with the passing of the Victorian founders. Starting with Production and Reproduction, he has produced a score of books over the last three decades investigating why Sub-Saharan Africa differs so strikingly from the pre-industrial societies of Europe and Asia; and latterly refuting the West’s claim to being exceptional, especially when compared with Asia. Goody found that kin groups in the major societies of Eurasia frequently pass on property through both sexes, a process of ‘diverging devolution’ that is virtually unknown in Sub-Saharan Africa, where inheritance follows the line of one sex only. Particularly when women’s property includes the means of production — land in agricultural societies — attempts will be made to control these heiresses, banning premarital sex and making arranged marriages for them, often within the same group and with a strong preference for monogamy. Direct inheritance by women is also associated with the isolation of the nuclear family in kinship terminology, where a distinction is drawn between one’s own parents and siblings and other relatives of the same generation, unlike in lineage systems. All of this reflects a class basis for society that was broadly absent in Africa.

The major Eurasian civilizations were organized through large states run by literate elites whose lifestyle embraced both the city and the countryside. In other words, what we have here is Gordon Childe’s ‘urban revolution’ in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, where

…an elaborate bureaucracy, a complex division of labour, a stratified society based on ecclesiastical landlordism…[were] made possible by intensive agriculture where title to landed property was of supreme importance.

The analytical focus that lends unity to Goody’s compendious work is consistent with an intellectual genealogy linking him through Childe to Morgan-Engels and ultimately Rousseau. The key to understanding social forms lies in production, which for us means machine production. Civilization or human culture is largely shaped by the means of communication — once writing, now an array of mechanized forms. The site of social struggles is property, now principally conflicts over intellectual property. And his central issue of reproduction has never been more salient than at a time when the aging citizens of rich countries depend on the proliferating mass of young people out there. Kinship needs to be reinvented too.

A new human universal: the unity of self and society

A lot hinges on where in the long process of human evolution we imagine the world is today. The Victorians believed that they stood at the pinnacle of civilization. I think of us as being like the first digging-stick operators, primitives stumbling into the invention of agriculture. In the late 1990s, I asked what it is about us that future generations will be interested in. I settled on the rapid advances then being made in forming a single interactive network linking all humanity. This has two striking features: first, the network is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from production and politics; and second, it is driven by a digital revolution in communications whose symbol is the internet, the network of networks. So my research over the last decade has been concerned with how the forms of money and exchange are changing in the context of this communications revolution.

My case for global integration rests on three developments of the last two decades: 1. The collapse of the Soviet Union, opening up the world to transnational capitalism and neo-liberal economic policies. 2. The entry of China’s and India’s two billion people, a third of humanity, into the world market as powers in their own right and the globalization of capital accumulation, for the first time loosening the grip of America and Europe on the global economy. 3. The shortening of time and distance brought about by the communications revolution, linked to a restlessly mobile population. The corollary of this revolution is a counter-revolution, the reassertion of state power since 9-11 and the imperialist war for oil in the Middle East. As Kant said, conflict is the catalyst for seeking a lawful basis of world society. Certainly humanity has regressed significantly from the hopes for equality released by the Second World War and the anti-colonial revolution that followed it. On the other hand, growing awareness of the consequences of our collective actions for life on this planet might be another stimulus to take world society seriously. Society is caught precariously between national and global forms at present; and that is why new ways of thinking are so vital.

What this adds up to is the possible formation of a new human universal. By this I mean making a world where all people can live together, not the imposition of principles that suit some powerful interests at the expense of the rest. The next universal will be unlike its predecessors, the Christian and bourgeois versions through which the West has sought to dominate or replace the cultural particulars that organize people’s lives everywhere. The main precedent for such an approach to discovering our common humanity is great literature which achieves universality through going deeply into particular personalities, relations and places. The new universal will not just tolerate cultural particulars, but will be founded on knowing that true human community can only be realized through them. There are two prerequisites for being human: we must each learn to be self-reliant to a high degree and to belong to others, merging our identities in a bewildering variety of social relationships. Much of modern ideology emphasizes how problematic it is to be both self-interested and mutual, to be economic as well as social, we might say. When culture is set up to expect a conflict between the two, it is hard to be both. Yet the two sides are often inseparable in practice and some societies, by encouraging private and public interests to coincide, have managed to integrate them more effectively than ours. One premise of the new human universal will thus be the unity of self and society.

Marcel Mauss held that the attempt to create a free market for private contracts is utopian and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism. Human institutions everywhere are founded on the unity of individual and society, freedom and obligation, self-interest and concern for others. Modern capitalism thus rests on an unsustainable attachment to one of these poles. The pure types of selfish and generous economic action obscure the complex interplay between our individuality and belonging in subtle ways to others. If learning to be two-sided is the means of becoming human, then the lesson is apparently hard to learn. Each of us embarks on a journey outward into the world and inward into the self. Society is mysterious to us because we have lived in it and it now dwells inside us at a level that is not ordinarily visible from the perspective of everyday life. All the places we have lived in are sources of introspection concerning our relationship to society; and one method for understanding the world is to make an ongoing practice of trying to synthesize these varied experiences. If a person would have an identity — would be one thing, one self – this requires trying to make out of fragmented social experience a more coherent whole, a world in other words as singular as the self.

Kant is the source for the notion that society may be as much an expression of individual subjectivity as a collective force out there. Copernicus solved the problem of the movement of the heavenly bodies by having the spectator revolve while they were at rest, instead of them revolve around the spectator. Kant extended this achievement for physics into metaphysics. In his Preface to The Critique of Pure Reason he writes,

Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects… but what if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge?

In order to understand the world, we must begin not with the empirical existence of objects, but with the reasoning embedded in our experience itself and in all the judgments we have made. This is to say that the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. Our task is to unite the two poles as subjective individuals who share the object world with the rest of humanity. Knowledge of society must be personal and moral before it is defined by the laws imposed on each of us from above.

Kant’s achievement was soon overthrown by a counter-revolution that identified society with the state. This was launched by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right and it was only truly consummated after the First World War. As a result, the personal was separated from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. Twentieth-century society was conceived of as an impersonal mechanism defined by international division of labour, national bureaucracy and scientific laws understood only by experts. Not surprisingly, most people felt ignorant and impotent in the face of such a society. Yet, we have never been more conscious of ourselves as unique personalities who make a difference. That is why questions of identity are so central to politics today.

Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between themselves as subjects and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. Today it is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

How else can we repair this rupture between self and society? Mohandas K. Gandhi’s critique of the modern identification of society with the state was devastating. He believed that it disabled citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ sense of their own self-reliance. He proposed instead that every human being is a unique personality and participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole. Between these extremes lie proliferating associations of great variety. He settled on the village as the vehicle for Indians’ aspirations for self-organization; and this made him in many respects a typical twentieth-century nationalist. But what is most relevant to us is his existentialist project. If the world of society and nature is devoid of meaning, each of us is left feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. How do we bridge the gap between a puny self and a vast, unknowable world? The answer is to scale down the world, to scale up the self or a combination of both, so that a meaningful relationship might be established between the two. Gandhi devoted a large part of his philosophy to building up the personal resources of individuals. Our task is to bring this project up to date.

Novels and movies allow us to span actual and possible worlds. They bring history down in scale to a familiar frame (the paperback, the screen) and audiences enter into that history subjectively on any terms their imagination permits. The sources of our alienation are commonplace. What interests me is resistance to alienation, whatever form it takes, religious or otherwise. How can we feel at home out there, in the restless turbulence of the modern world? The digital revolution is in part a response to this need. We feel at home in intimate, face-to-face relations; but we must engage in remote, often impersonal exchanges at distance. Improvements in telecommunications cannot stop until we replicate at distance the experience of face-to-face interaction. For the drive to overcome alienation is even more powerful than alienation itself. Social evolution has reached the point of establishing near-universal communications; now we must make world society in the image of our own humanity.

Anthropology and the crisis of the intellectuals

The universities have been around for a long time, but they came into their own in the last half-century, as the training grounds for bureaucracy that Hegel envisaged. Most contemporary intellectuals have taken refuge in them by now and human personality has been in retreat there for some time. In Enemies of Promise: publishing, perishing and the eclipse of scholarship, Lindsay Waters, humanities editor for Harvard University Press, claims that the current explosion of academic publishing is a bubble as certain to burst as the dot com boom. Publishing, he says, has become more concerned with quantity than quality and mechanization ‘has proved lethal’. He warns academics, in the face of the corporate takeover of the university,

…to preserve and protect the independence of their activities, before the market becomes our prison. (…) Many universities are, in significant part, financial holding operations (…) The commercialization of higher education has caused innovation in the humanities to come to a standstill.

Because Waters blames the humanities’ decline on money and machines, his call for resistance has no practical basis in contemporary conditions. Anna Grimshaw and I, in the pamphlet that launched our imprint, Prickly Pear Press, once tried to locate anthropology’s compromised relationship to academic bureaucracy in the crisis facing modern intellectuals, as identified by the Caribbean writer, C.L.R. James in American Civilization. We held that intellectual practice should be integrated more closely with social life, given their increasing separation by academic bureaucracy. The need to escape from the ivory tower to join the people where they live was the inspiration for modern anthropology. But this had been negated by the expansion of the universities after 1945 and by the political pressures exerted on academics since the 1980s.

Edward Said, in Representations of the Intellectual, without ever mentioning anthropology, made claims for intellectuals that could be taken as a metaphor for the discipline. He emphasized the creative possibilities in migration and marginality, of being an awkward outsider who crosses boundaries, questions certainties, a figure at once involved and detached.  Narrow professionalism poses an immense threat to academic life. Specialization, concern with disciplinary boundaries and expert knowledge lead to a suspension of critical enquiry and ultimately a drift towards legitimating power. The exile and the amateur might combine to inject new radicalism into a jaded professionalism. Said credited James with being an intellectual of this kind, but James placed intellectuals within a historical process that had aligned them with power and made them increasingly at odds with the people. Said did not identify how and why intellectual life had been transformed from free individual creativity into serving the specialized needs of bureaucracy.

For James there was a growing conflict between the concentration of power at the top of society and the aspirations of people everywhere for democracy to be extended into all areas of their lives. This conflict was most advanced in America. The struggle was for civilization or barbarism, for individual freedom within new and expanded conceptions of social life (democracy) or a fragmented and repressed subjectivity stifled by coercive bureaucracies (totalitarianism). The intellectuals were caught between the expansion of bureaucracy and the growing power and presence of people as a force in world society. Unable to recognize that people’s lives mattered more than their own ideas, they oscillated between an introspective individualism (psychoanalysis) and service to the ruling powers, whether of the right (fascism) or left (Stalinism). As a result, the traditional role of the intellectual as an independent witness and critic standing unequivocally for truth had been seriously compromised. Their absorption as wage slaves and pensioners of bureaucracy not only removed intellectuals’ independence, but also separated their specialized activities from social life.

One anthropologist who addressed these questions of intellectuals and the public, of ideas and life, knowledge and power, was Edmund Leach in his prescient BBC lectures, A Runaway World? There he identified a world in movement, marked by the interconnectedness of people and things. This provoked the mood of optimism and fear that characterized the 60s, when established structures seemed to be breaking down. The reality of change could not be understood through conventional cultural categories predicated on stable order.  Moral categories based on habits of separation and division could only make the world’s movement seem alien and frightening. An ethos of scientific detachment reinforced by binary ideas (right/wrong) lay at the core of society’s malaise. Leach called for an intellectual practice based on movement and engagement, connection and dialectic. In short he was calling for the reinsertion of ideas into social life.

The solution to anthropology’s problems cannot be found in increased specialization, in the discovery of new areas of social life to colonize with the aid of old professional paradigms or in a return to literary scholarship disguised as a new dialogical form. It requires new patterns of social engagement extending beyond the universities to the widest reaches of world society. We must acknowledge how people everywhere are pushing back the boundaries of the old society and remain open to universality, which has been driven underground by national capitalism and would be buried forever if the present corporate privatization of intellectual life is allowed to succeed.

The recent expansion of academic bureaucracy has accentuated the objectification of thought as a marker of status and reward. Ideas have become commodities to be possessed individually, traded and stolen. An intensified focus on the formal abstraction of performance has led to the academic labour market being driven by the empty measures of print production that Waters rightly denigrates. Subjective contributions, like the qualities of a good teacher, inevitably carry much less weight. And so the academic intellectuals, who might have offered a critique of the corporate takeover of the universities, find themselves instead drawn passively into a vicious variant of the privatization of ideas. Something must be done to reinstate human personality in our common understanding of how the world works. But this should be through the medium of money and machines, not despite them. Kant’s cosmopolitan moral politics offer one vision of the course such a renewal might take.

Anthropology now and to come

Anthropology can no longer be summarized as what a few luminaries in the centres of imperial power think and do. Americans dominate a much larger profession, for sure, while British and French anthropology are in decline and the European Association grows in stature. The annual AAA meetings have become a global gathering point where anthropologists are more likely to meet national colleagues than at home, rather like the African politicians of the interwar period who got to meet each other in Paris or London. The second largest annual meetings are in Brazil, where anthropologists have expanded from their Amazonian base to offer informed commentary on all aspects of national society and culture. Scandinavian anthropologists draw on their social democratic tradition to exhibit a high level of public engagement. Countries like Nigeria and India sustain large numbers of anthropologists in the more conventional study of ‘tribal’ areas. The discipline appears to be flourishing in the lands of new settlement, such as Australia, Canada and South Africa. New varieties of national anthropology are springing up all over Eastern Europe. I could go on, but the point is made. ‘Anthropology’ has slipped its colonial bonds and is now many things all over the world.

The same cannot be said of the institutional setting for anthropology. Like most other intellectual activities, the discipline has become largely locked up in the universities. Anthropology’s modernist moment — the commitment to join the people where they live in order to find out what they do and think – became ossified as the professional mantra that we do ‘fieldwork-based ethnography’. The universities themselves, in most countries outside the United States, are centrally organized by the state; and the ethnographic model of society –indigenous, culturally homogeneous, bounded territorial units – uncomfortably mimics the nationalism that it was originally design to promote and, worse, dissolves world society into a plethora of local fragments, each aspiring to self-sufficiency. If cultural relativism was once a legitimate reaction to racist imperialism, the legacy of the ethnographic turn has been to make it impossible for the bulk of academic anthropologists to respond effectively to our own ‘Magellan moment’. We generate fine-grained accounts of human experience, but without the aspiration to universality that still animated the discipline up until the 50s. The only people we address now are ourselves and our students.

This is not to say that anthropology sits well with the modern university. We retain the will to range freely across disciplinary boundaries; the humanism and democracy entailed in our methods contradict the bureaucratic imperatives of corporate privatization at every turn. Anthropology has always been an anti-discipline, a holding company for idiosyncratic individuals to do what they like and call it ‘anthropology’. This strategy is coming under heavy pressure today. Increasingly, academic anthropologists turn inwards for defence against all-comers and this often leaves them exposed and without allies in the struggle for survival within the universities. We can’t assume that the identification of anthropology with the academy in the previous century will continue in the next. It is now harder for self-designated guilds to control access to professional knowledge. People have other ways of finding out for themselves, rather than submit to academic hierarchy. And there are many agencies out there competing to give them what they want, whether through journalism, tourism or all the self-learning possibilities afforded by the internet. Popular resistance to the power of disembedded experts is essentially moral, in that people insist on restoring a personal dimension to human knowledge. The anthropologists’ current dependence on academic bureaucracy leaves them highly vulnerable to such developments.

So the issue of anthropology’s future needs to be couched in broader terms than those defined by the profession itself. I have been building a case that ‘anthropology’ is indispensable to the making of world society in the coming century. It may be that some elements of the current academic discipline could play a part in that; but the prospects are not good, given the narrow localism and anti-universalism that is prevalent there. Rather I have sought inspiration in Kant’s philosophy and in the critique of unequal society that originates with Rousseau. ‘Anthropology’ would then mean whatever we need to know about humanity as a whole if we want to build a more equal world fit for everyone. I hope that this usage could be embraced by students of history, sociology, political economy, philosophy and literature, as well as by members of my own profession. Many disciplines might contribute without being exclusively devoted to it. The idea of ‘development’ has played a similar role in the last half-century.

Disciplines thrive when their object, theory and method are coherent. In the eighteenth century, anthropology’s object was human nature, its theory ‘reason’, its method humanist philosophy. In the nineteenth century, anthropology’s object was to explain racial hierarchy, its theory was evolution, its method world history. The object of British social anthropology in the twentieth century was primitive societies, its theory was functionalism and the method fieldwork. We need a new synthesis of object, theory and method suitable to conditions now. The ethnographic paradigm has been moving for half a century in response to the anti-colonial revolution and other seismic changes in world history. But anthropologists have retained the method of face-to-face encounters while dumping the original object and theory. Paradoxically, while the anthropologists have rejected philosophy, history and anything else that could give meaning to the purpose of their discipline, the idea of ethnography has been adopted in everything from geography to nursing studies. Of course the anthropologists claim that the others don’t understand what ethnography is really about or how it is done by the people who know, themselves. But they have forgotten what it is about ‘anthropology’ that makes their version of ‘ethnography’ special. They no longer ask the basic questions that launched anthropology — what makes inequality intolerable or how people can live together peaceably. So they can’t explain what is missing when others take up ‘ethnography’. A renewal of the anthropological project in the terms I have suggested here would at least force them to do so.

I have made much of Kant’s example here because he attempted to address the emergence of world society directly. He conceived of anthropology primarily as a form of humanist education; and this contrasts starkly with the emphasis on scientific research outputs in today’s universities. We could also emulate his ‘pragmatic’ anthropology, a personal programme of lifetime learning with the aim of developing practical knowledge of the world. In his Preface to the Anthropology, Kant recommended, apart from systematic observation of life around us, that we study ‘world history, biographies and even plays and novels’. He sought a method for integrating individual subjectivity with the moral construction of world society. World history, as practised by the likes of Jack Goody and Eric Wolf, is indispensable to any anthropology worthy of the name today. The method of biography is particularly well-suited to the study of self and society and I would predict that its use will be more commonplace in future. No-one, in my view, better exemplifies the vision and methods needed for anthropology’s renewal than Sidney Mintz. Apart from his record as a Caribbean ethnographer, he has produced an outstanding biography in Worker in the Cane and in Sweetness and Power world history of the first rank. The ‘literary turn’ in anthropology, symbolized by the publication of Writing Culture two decades ago, has also opened up anthropology to fiction — novels, plays and movies. This is surely for the good. It would perhaps be too much to urge ethnographers to revisit the philosophical roots of their discipline

The rapid development of global communications today contains within its movement a far-reaching transformation of world society. ‘Anthropology’ in some form is one of the intellectual traditions best suited to make sense of it. The academic seclusion of the discipline, its passive acquiescence to bureaucracy, is the chief obstacle preventing us from grasping this historical opportunity. We cling to our revolutionary commitment to joining the people, but have forgotten what it was for or what else is needed, if we are to succeed in helping to build a universal society. I grew up in an education system designed to prepare graduates for the Indian civil service, so I have had to retool late in life with the help of younger and more skilled companions. The internet is a wonderful chance to open up the flow of knowledge and information. Rather than obsessing over how we can control access to what we write, which means cutting off the mass of humanity almost completely from our efforts, we need to figure out new interactive forms of engagement that span the globe and to make the results of our intellectual labours available to everyone. Ever since the internet went public and the World Wide Web was invented, I have made online self-publishing the core of my anthropological practice.

It matters less that an academic guild should retain its monopoly of access to knowledge than that ‘anthropology’ should be taken up by a broad intellectual coalition for whom the realization of a new human universal – a world society fit for humanity as a whole — is a matter of urgent personal concern.

Center for 21^st century studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Lecture in the series ‘Disciplinary dialogs: past knowing’, September 7^th, 2007