If I have learned anything from these amateur inquiries, it is that the history of ideas and the history of society have at best a very loose chronological relationship. But that hasn’t stopped me from pursuing the connection. I have been sustained in this by a belief that social science is ideology and therefore in denial as far as social reality is concerned. This explains why the epistemology of economics remains trapped in the seventeenth century world of Galileo and Newton, caught between rationalism (microeconomic theory) and empiricism (econometrics); or why the methodological achievements of quantum mechanics – you can’t measure position and movement at the same time and if you observe something you change it – have had so little impact on the social sciences in the twentieth century. I have become convinced that the physicists and mathematicians, fondly assuming that their objects of study have nothing to do with human experience, are in fact a better guide than the social scientists to how ideas about the world are influenced by society. For this reason, I have avoided biological subjects since these lend themselves so readily to ideology, preferring rather to glean what I can from the study of stars, earthquakes, clouds, metals and elementary particles.

The history of science, technology and society has achieved a success in our time comparable to the ethnographic movement of the early twentieth century — using similar methods. Faced with their own inability to grasp Maxwell’s equations, these intrepid explorers have convinced us that we should not celebrate the inventions of great men, but rather should investigate how the laboratories were organized and the machines made to run. Since I do not aspire to pioneer a new segment of the academic division of labor, I have followed what I can of the scientific literature produced by its leading practitioners. Most of the mathematical reasoning passes me by. What I am looking for above all are the prose statements that reveal how these authors explain their discoveries in general terms. I hope to find here the implicit models of society held by the scientists. Inevitably such an amateur investigation proceeds by guesswork.

Nevertheless, I have some expertise in the field of statistics, which I have practiced and taught for four decades (not counting my early career as a scientific gambler on the horses); and I focus here on a remarkable shift in its dominant paradigm. When I was trained in the discipline, all the most powerful techniques were derived from the Gaussian or ‘normal’ curve with its parameters of mean and standard deviation. ‘Non-parametric’ statistics had made an appearance in fields such as social psychology, but they were mathematically weaker. At the same time, graph theory offered a more systematic approach to networks, which interested me as a student of migration and urbanization, but its limitations were all too apparent, as we will see. Only in the last decade have I become aware of the emergence of another statistical paradigm, based on the ‘power law’ distribution, which itself draws on ‘the new science of networks’. Both promote a much more dynamic and unequal understanding of the world than what went before. I have been led to speculate on why this might be so; and have turned to a historical idea, that humanity is currently caught between national and global versions of society.

I have not carried out an exhaustive survey of the intellectual antecedents for my approach. Instead, I have placed my main bet on an essay by Durkheim and Mauss, “The primitive forms of classification”, published originally in Année Sociologique (1903) and in English as Primitive Classification with an introduction by Rodney Needham (1963). They sought to demonstrate that the classification of things in nature, the categories of understanding, replicate the classification of relations between men in society, whose forms ought to be considered to be prior. It was a daring example of Durkheim’s reductionist method for sociology and Mauss, who later pursued a non-reductionist anthropology in works such as The Gift (1925), commented wryly that his contribution to this had been to collect the facts. The argument clearly prefigures Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) which to my mind is the most revolutionary work of modern social theory’s founding fathers.

As in Elementary Forms, the classification essay starts from the relationship between Australian totemism and clan organization. Variations are introduced by comparison with other Australian groups before the Zuni case is examined as an elaboration of the same principles, with the Sioux as an intermediate stage in what is taken to be a development of the system. Chinese astrology is introduced as one of many instances of more complex Asian societies to point out how a more abstract system, precursor of our own scientific rationalizations, shares some principles (such as hierarchy) with ‘simpler’ societies that are firmly rooted, they believe, in social morphology. There are lots of holes to be picked in this argument and Needham identifies most of them, for example that the direction of association between the classification of things and social classification is not established. Nor would we be as inclined to frame it in evolutionary terms. At least since Lévi-Strauss (1962), we have not drawn a firm line between intellectual abstraction and social complexity. But I still find the basic premise gripping and it inspired what follows.

Statistical patterns can be found in nature and society. Their distribution may conform to mathematical models. The ‘normal’ or ‘Gaussian’ distribution describes any variable that clusters around its central tendency, with the mode (the most common quantity), the median (the middle point) and the mean (the arithmetical average) all converging to produce a typical measure of the population as a whole. The mean and standard deviation (a measure of the overall spread) are known as ‘parameters’ and, when the assumption of normality holds, mathematically strong techniques of statistical inference may be applied. If such an assumption is not warranted, ‘non-parametric’ techniques of statistical inference may be used that are more widely applicable and mathematically weaker. This terminology originated with Jacob Wolfowitz, father of Paul, an architect of the Iraq war. Thus, for example, take a large sample of US adult males and measure their height. Most cases will fall between five and six feet with very few less than four or more than seven feet. Because this is a continuous variable, the results can be plotted on a graph to which a curve may be fitted. It too will have a single peak with fan tails on the high and low ends. This ‘normal’ distribution is popularly known as the ‘bell-curve’. For more than a century statistical inference has largely been based on this curve with its parameters of mean and standard deviation.

More recently, another statistical pattern has been making the headlines. If you count the book sales on Amazon and plot them according to frequency, the curve hugs the vertical and horizontal axes, indicating a few very large numbers (the blockbusters) and many small ones (the ‘long tail’ of books like yours and mine). This is a typical manifestation of something called a ‘power-law’ distribution. This is a relationship between the size and frequency of a variable, where the frequency decreases faster than the size increases. If the data are plotted on a log-log scale, the result is a straight line sloping down from left to right. Thus an earthquake that is twice as strong will occur four times more rarely. If this pattern holds for earthquakes of all sizes, it is said to ‘scale’, meaning that there is no typical size that could be said to be representative of earthquakes as a class of phenomena, as is the case with normal distributions. Power laws are found in a wide range of natural and manmade instances. But research on them has grown rapidly in recent decades. Power laws have been discovered for the frequency of words used in natural language; and the distribution of molecular reactions in cells reveals a few hubs linked to most reactions and many weakly connected molecules.

The ‘new science of networks’, growing out of the physics of complexity, has been announced by authors such as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (2002) and Duncan Watts (2003). Just as, in the late nineteenth century, the normal distribution seemed to lend unity to statistical patterns emerging in a number of apparently unrelated fields, such as criminology, astronomy and plant genetics, now the power-law distribution appears in fields as disparate as the worldwide web, stock markets, air transport, Hollywood actors’ networks, electric power grids, urban hierarchies and molecular biology.

Empirical phenomena lend weight to the mathematical models used by statisticians, but their relative prominence in our collective imagination reflects how we experience society in history. Modern statistics took off a century and a half ago as a way of regulating people through enumerating them. Soon the normal distribution became the basis for the development of inferential statistics. The very word normal says it all — conformity to a standard revealed by a central tendency, meaning that a population can be described in terms of an average type. The key assumption is randomness. This means that every member of a group has an equal chance of being selected. The democratic premise is obvious. This is an egalitarian as well as an atomistic model. Moreover, the quantities have to be measured on an interval scale, so that size is a continuous variable, not broken up into the separate classes of nominal or ordinal scales. Parametric statistics are cross-sectional data and fundamentally synchronic or static. Time-series are built on afterwards. Populations are expected to be bounded and knowable as such, much like the citizen body of a nation.

Does the recent rise to prominence of the power-law distribution, with its premise of extreme inequality, tell us something about our collective experience of society today? Power-laws have been known for some time. In the nineteenth century, when urban economy was relatively free of national controls, they were discerned in the dramatically uneven growth of cities. Later both Pareto (1906) and Zipf (1949) proposed something similar in the form of rank-order distributions, the one for income distribution and the other for word frequencies. Pareto is credited with discovering the 20/80 rule — the idea that 20% of the people own 80% of the wealth. But the premise of inequality contained in this rule was not adapted to the ideology of national society in the twentieth century.

The ‘normal’ image of the natural and social world was credible because it reflected the premises of nation-states formed to regulate industrial capitalism. In the last century, anthropologists transposed the idea of the nation-state as the typical form of society to ethnographic descriptions of so-called primitive societies, thereby demonstrating that the shared model of cultural homogeneity was universal. The power-law distribution is characterized by a few very large quantities and many small ones. In network science, it is commonly observed that networks consist of a few hubs with many links and a large number of weakly-connected nodes. The discovery of power laws is related to the physics of complexity, the attempt to study interconnectivity in a non-reductionist way (as opposed to the isolated atoms of the random universe). This science is mainly concerned with the edge between order and chaos and with critical moments of transition, as when chaotic water molecules assume the rigid pattern of ice. It is now thought that self-organization, including life, flourishes in this interstitial zone. Power laws thus describe open recursive processes without any of the bounded and synchronic assumptions built into parametric statistics.

Specialized study of networks in social science arose in the 1950s as a result of the development of graph theory in mathematics. The assumptions of this theory are now revealed to be unrealistic. It described an inventory of nodes whose number is fixed and remains unchanged throughout the life of the network. All nodes are taken to be equivalent and are linked together randomly. These principles of randomness, stasis and equivalence were unquestioned for forty years. Territorial states lent some credibility to networks configured in their own image. Thus road maps do not diverge markedly from the model, each centre having roughly the same number of links as the others.

Stanley Milgram (1967) conducted an experiment to see how many personal links would be needed to connect any two individuals in the United States. He found the median number of links was 5.5, hence the popular idea of ‘six degrees of separation’, that all humanity is connected by six links on average. This ‘small world’ phenomenon does not sit well with the assumptions of a random universe. Then it was discovered that most Hollywood actors were linked by two or three degrees to Kevin Bacon through appearances in the same movies (Watts 2003:93-95). Mark Granovetter (1973) established that some individuals convey information between clusters of job-seekers. And the typical clustering of networks was modeled by Watts and Strogatz in 1998. But the basic assumptions of original graph theory still held. The key shift emerged with the recognition that some network nodes are hubs and some persons are ‘connectors’ (Gladwell 2000). People vary widely in their ability to make social connection and in this they resemble an air traffic grid, with a few O’Hares and many small airports. Networks were now seen as linking nodes of unequal size and depending on a few highly connected individuals. But what produces this effect?

Barabasi (2002) established a fit between patterns of website links and the power-law distribution. These networks are ‘scale-free’ and lack the parameters of the normal distribution. There is no characteristic node in the continuous curve described by the power law which reflects the fact that networks grow over time. Skewed distribution of links may be accounted for by ‘preferential attachment’, so that growth with preferences accounts for the hub phenomenon (early-comers tend to attract more links) and undermines graph theory’s key assumptions of randomness, stasis and equivalence. There is an analogy with the market principle that ‘the rich get richer’. Indeed in the network economy ‘winner takes all’. The winner is often unpredictable until one node crosses a threshold and takes off. The trick is then to find the threshold. When hubs are weakened, the network as a whole may be visited by ‘cascading failure’.

The convergence of world markets and the internet has multiplied opportunities for scale-free networks. If corporate hierarchy was well-suited to the era of mass production for national markets (‘Fordism’), the rise of a web or network model of economy involves a shift from vertical integration to flat, virtual integration, as Castells (2001) has long insisted. I have shown in a recent book (Hart 2000) that, when the money circuit is detached from real production and trade, the market is revealed as a weighted and directed network, with the mass of ordinary stocks following a few market leaders. Already the power-law distribution has been harnessed to predictive models based on analysis of the movement of the eight or so main stocks in a given sector. But, as we now know, this process is also inherently unstable (Taleb 2007).

Barabasi (2002) claims that nature normally hates power-laws. Hitherto physicists have found them near the critical point of phase transitions, as when a metal is magnetized. Even if it can be shown to be regular, power law growth is unpredictable. Statisticians can only say that sometimes a variable crosses a threshold and then it takes off. We have been led to believe for more than a century that the bell-curve is preponderant in the physical world and this has helped to make prevailing social ideologies ‘natural’. European societies still largely hold to these ideologies. But the Americans have long held that income inequality is inevitable and today even the radical democratic wing of internet society, the bloggers and the peer-to-peer activists, tend to accept the fact of power-law distributions, claiming that as long as choices can be made freely (equal opportunity), this inequality is acceptable, one might say ‘natural’ or even ‘normal’.

This whole paradigm shift in scientific and statistical models coincides with the breakdown of the nation-state’s monopoly of society and with it the corporatist premises of twentieth century economy, such as jobs for life and social planning. For three decades neo-conservative liberals subordinated national economy to global markets; and the digital revolution has given us a new emergent model of society in the internet. The norm of this new world market was stark inequality. The egalitarian premises of nation-states, seeking to curb capitalism’s polarizing tendencies, gave way to a world society where the winner takes all. All of this has been thrown into stark relief by the economic crisis of 2008-9. But for now the power-law is king. It’s a different model of statistics, for sure. Perhaps it captures society poised between national and world forms. Or maybe we reverted temporarily to the imbalance between market and state typical of the Gilded Age, before national regulation aspired to curb domestic capitalism. The pressing political question for humanity, now given a new urgency by the collapse of the credit boom, remains whether new forms of association will enable us to harness the polarities of the network economy for common ends.

There is an objective basis of sorts for these statistical models in nature and society. But the one that attracts most attention in a given period is likely to reflect dominant ideologies. Many types of economic transaction co-exist in all societies, but in each of them one is singled out as being typically human. Thus markets are universally present in some form, but only under capitalism is the market made synonymous with society. Equally, the heroic gift is taken to be characteristic of the societies of the kula ring, even though individualistic commerce is also present there. The dominant social from over the last century has been ‘national capitalism’, the institutional attempt to manage money, markets and accumulation though central bureaucracy, within a cultural community of national citizens who are presumptively equal. The last three decades saw a significant retreat from the premises of this model in favour of the free movement of money everywhere, the penetration of markets into public and domestic life and an inevitable rise in inequality. Having been raised in the heyday of British social democracy, only to face the new liberalism and now global economic catastrophe, I have had to internalize a radical paradigm shift and then to unlearn it sharply. Changes in the dominant statistical paradigm, with some lag perhaps, offer a window on that social history.

When I carried out fieldwork in Ghana during the 1960s, I was amazed by how migrants found their relatives, after traveling 500 miles to an unknown city of a million people. They had no addresses or phone numbers written down. When they arrived in the central lorry park, they would look for someone wearing Northern dress and ask him where they could find people like themselves. Directed to a particular district, they would seek out a leading figure in the ethnic community. They might then be directed to someone else from their home village. By all means, within an hour or two, they would be sitting with their relative. These African migrants knew that we live in small worlds connected by fewer links than most of us imagine. They used contingent human encounters and network hubs like local big men, not street maps. Their method was news to me then, but it shouldn’t be now.

References

Barabasi, A.-L. 2002. Linked: the New Science of Networks. Cambridge MA: Perseus.
Castells, M. 2001. The Internet Galaxy. London: Oxford University Press.
Durkheim, E. 1965 (1912). The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Glencoe IL: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. and M. Mauss. 1963 (1903). Primitive Classification. Chicago: University Press.
Gerratana, V. 1973. “Marx and Darwin.” New Left Review 82: 60-82.
Gladwell, M. 2000. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown.
Granovetter, M. 1973. “The strength of weak ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78: 1360-1380.
Hacking, I. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: University Press.
Hart, K. 2000 The Memory Bank. London: Profile Republished in 2001 as Money in an Unequal World. New York and London: Texere.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966 (1962). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University Press.
Mauss, M. 1990 (1925). The Gift: form and reason of exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.
Milgram, S. 1967. “The small world problem.” Psychology Today 2: 60-67.
Pareto, V. 1972 (1906). Manual of Political Economy. London: Macmillan.
Spengler, O. 1962 [1918]. The Decline of the West (abridged edition). New York: Alfred Knopf.
Taleb, N. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Penguin.
Watts, D. 2003. Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age. London: Heinemann.
Watts, D. and Strogatz. 1998. “Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks.” Nature 393: 440-442.
Zipf, G. 1949 Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort. Cambridge MA: Addison-Wesley.

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“Neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.”

This is a fair summary of the thesis and much of Lendman’s account is valuable, even if it is inevitably selective and its main points have been made by a number of journalists at less length (including this one and this). My interest is in the theory itself, in what sort of handle it gives us on the Haitian disaster and what to do next. Although I admit we are an insignificant minority, I am also interested in the lessons we might draw from this event for anthropology as an intellectual project, especially since the Haitian crisis forces us to ask what anthropologists have done and might do.

I argue that anthropologists are a prime constituency for Naomi Klein’s ideas, since she paints a bleak picture of the world without offering any political or intellectual program capable of addressing the problems she identifies. This allows her adherents to retreat into their habitual myopic passivity while claiming to be radically engaged.

The Open Anthropology Cooperative was formed less than a year ago to promote a broad-based discussion of anthropology’s place in our world and Haiti already features in several discussions (The Help That Haiti Needs and two threads in the Economic Anthropology Discussion Group). An anthropology adequate to meet the challenges of our 21st century world would have to improve on its track record over the last century. So this is an opportunity for us to reflect on how and why that might be so.

In what follows, I reproduce a review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine that I wrote over a year ago. I then turn to disaster capitalism as an analytical framework for understanding the situation in Haiti and its relevance for debates concerning anthropology’s future.

* * * * * * * * *

Thirty years ago I was discussing the state of the world with a radical philosopher at Yale. She dismissed the Americans of course, the Russians, British, Germans, Chinese and Japanese too. So I asked her where in the world she looked to for hope. And she said ‘Mozambique’, then and now a plucky little country struggling against capitalist imperialism in darkest Africa. Mozambique qualified because it was insignificant and far away. She knew nothing of the place personally, but it offered a measure of hope without compromising her bleak picture of the world she lived in.

Naomi Klein’s The shock doctrine likewise presents a monolithic account of ‘neoliberalism’ that leaves room for a solution only at the margins. Her account, which comes endorsed by many radical literati including John Le Carré, Arundhati Roy and John Berger, starts with the ‘Chicago Boys’ in Latin America’s Southern Cone during the early 1970s. She covers much the same ground as David Harvey in A brief history of neoliberalism (2007). Harvey draws a contrast between the ‘embedded liberalism’ of the welfare state consensus from the 1940s to the 1970s and the ‘disembedded’ markets that followed; Klein speaks of neoliberalism as a ‘counter-revolution’. Both cover the last three decades or so without attempting to place them in any larger analysis of modern world history. Harvey speculates about inflationary and deflationary routes out of neoliberalism, but Klein appears to see no end to it.

Both authors try to tell One Big Story, the restoration of capitalist power by Reagan and Thatcher (with peripheral support from Pinochet and Deng), but Klein extends hers to include a string of disasters since the millennium (September 11th, the invasion of Iraq, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina). She represents this sequence as a wholesale looting of public assets by corporate interests in the name of Milton Friedman’s free market doctrine. ‘Disaster capitalism’ generates and feeds off ‘economic shocks’ and these seem to be multiplying since the time when ‘structural adjustment’ imposed brutal economic medicine on weak governments. Klein links the CIA’s revival of torture to an earlier history of electric shock treatment, drawing an evocative analogy between individual and collective loss of memory.

After the dictators, Klein’s narrative takes in the economic warfare launched under quasi-legal auspices in Bolivia, Poland, China and South Africa. Thatcher’s revolution was rescued by success against the Argentine generals. Russia’s wealth was handed over to the ‘oligarchs’ for a pittance and then the IMF organized a boot sale of Southeast Asian assets to Western corporations. And Israel’s coercive treatment of the Palestinians and Lebanon remains a laboratory for neoliberal repression everywhere. Developments within the United States all point in the same direction.

Does she see any hope of something else, born perhaps of popular resistance to this class warfare? A concluding chapter of two dozen pages (out of more than 500) addresses ‘the rise of people’s reconstruction’. Neoliberalism’s nemesis is – wait for it – Evo Morales! Hezbollah! Factory and farm co-ops in Argentina and Brazil! The French and Dutch rejection of the European constitution (the only reference to the EU in the whole book)! And Chávez of course. As people sort among the rubble of their societies, the final sentence tells us that ‘they are building in resilience – for when the next shock hits’. Naomi Klein’s totalizing vision of the contemporary world renders these scraps of resistance merely symbolic.

If neoliberalism is a counter-revolution, what was the revolution it overthrew and when did it take place? Perhaps there has been more than one of each. Now that the neoliberal era is manifestly running up against its own contradictions, answers to such questions are vital to any assessment of the prospects for a better world.

In retrospect, the peoples of the world made remarkable gains in freedom and equality after 1945, when they rejected the society that had given them two world wars and the Great Depression. This involved not only the formation of industrial states committed to democratic provision of employment, education, health and transport, but the dismantling of European empire by an anti-colonial revolution, first in Asia, then in Africa. The Cold War, in its own way, was a counter-revolution against all that, and in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Southern Africa it took the form of dirty wars (precursors of the ‘war on terror’) long after Friedman’s experiments in free market dictatorship had been launched. A second revolution came with the collapse of the Soviet Union and apartheid in the early 90s, a much reduced nuclear threat, the rise of the internet and the emergence of China, India and Brazil as economic powers. This wave of liberation soon provoked the reassertion of state power after September 11th and a new frenzy of illicit accumulation, not least in Iraq.

What is ‘new’ about neoliberalism (or ‘neo-conservatism’ as it is called in America, where liberalism still evokes Roosevelt’s New Deal)? The state’s pretensions to manage national economies have been progressively dismantled everywhere, while its coercive powers have been expanded. Some people were slower than others to catch onto the systematic stripping of public assets for private gain, profit accumulation with no acknowledgment of service, the erosion of civil liberties and the resurgence of racist imperialism. But after the financial collapse of 2008, everyone knows it.

The overthrow of social democracy in the name of market fundamentalism may have been achieved by coercion in Latin America; the privatization of post-socialism was licensed plunder; small states in regions like Africa that were already being bled by debt interest were brought to heel by the ‘Washington consensus’. Maybe the public authorities in the United States have long been less squeamish about employing techniques of intimidation in support of corporate profit. But who persuaded the pillars of European social democracy to roll over without a fight? The wholesale capitulation of national political classes to an obscene logic of self-enrichment still needs an explanation. Neither Klein nor Harvey is much help here.

To take another example from outside Europe, why would the leadership of the African National Congress throw away the legacy of the anti-apartheid movement in order to pander to international capital at the expense of their own long-suffering people? Naomi Klein’s chapter on South Africa is desperately thin, drawing on a handful of interviews to force the country into her all-encompassing vision, while ignoring the nuances of its history and place within the evolving world economy.

The rise of a sociological rhetoric of ‘embeddedness’ in recent years reminds us that Karl Polanyi’s stock has never been higher than today. In The great transformation, Polanyi (1944) debunked Victorian liberalism as the use of state power to secure the freedom of capital at the expense of all other interests. He condemned the high price the British working classes paid for the dominance of the ‘self-regulating market’; but there were also counter-movements within society like Chartism, as the victims of the new liberalism sought to defend themselves. Polanyi sometimes wrote of a ‘disembedded’ capitalism, but industrial markets remained thoroughly ‘embedded’ – first, in their dependence on the state and second through the links they retained with a range of social institutions. Polanyi’s real objection was not to the market as such, but to ‘market fundamentalism’.

At a London conference in 2008, ‘Rethinking economic anthropology: A human-centred approach’, Jean-Louis Laville reminded us of the two lessons to be drawn from the history of the 20th century:

“First, market society sustained by a concern for individual freedom generated huge inequalities; then submission of the economy to political will on the pretext of equality led to the suppression of freedom. These two solutions called democracy itself into question, whether in the form of totalitarian systems or, with a similar result, through the subordination of political power to that of money. If we reject both of these options, it is then a question of developing institutions capable of guaranteeing a plural economy within a democratic framework, exactly what is compromised when the rationale of material gain without limit has a monopoly.”

Laville, following Mauss and Polanyi, pilloried romantic radicals who would reject a caricature of the economy in the name of some future alternative, since all economic possibilities coexist now, including those that have been variously dominant in history. Our task is to build democratic solidarity (économie solidaire) through new institutional combinations and with a new emphasis. This means combining the free reciprocity of self-organized groups with the redistributive powers of the state.

It is, however, no longer as obvious as it was for Mauss, Polanyi and Keynes where the levers of democratic power are to be located, since the global explosion of money, markets and communications over the last quarter-century has severely exposed the limitations of national frameworks of economic management. We are clearly witnessing the start of another long swing in the balance between state and market. Central banks are pumping liquidity into failing asset markets. The rapid switch by the ‘masters of the universe’ from market triumphalism to the public begging bowl would be surprising, if it were not so familiar. Before long, a genuine revival of Keynesian redistributive politics seems to be inevitable. But the imbalances of the money system are now global, as the financial crisis of 2008 made clear to everyone. Society is already taking the form of large regional trading blocs, and the inability of the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF, WTO) to serve any interest beyond that of Western capital has long been obvious. The strength of any push to reform global institutions will depend on the severity of the current economic crisis. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s is bound to fail.

The shift of economic power from the West to Asia is palpable. But it is too early to write off the United States, which remains the world’s largest economy and may soon reap the economic benefits of a lower exchange rate and the sell-off of overpriced assets. Rather than demonizing US imperialism as the source of all our woes, we should distinguish between the American government, corporations and people. The main opposition to the monopolistic privatization of the cultural commons by firms like Microsoft consists of other US corporations (Sun, HP, IBM) and American activist networks in the free software/open source movement (with intrepid assistance from Scandinavia). American voters first turned Bush into a lame-duck president and then elected Obama. While all this was happening, the world sat enthralled on the edge of their seats.

It will not do to place our trust for democratic renewal exclusively on small-scale initiatives in Latin America. The new combinations of money, machines and people emerging today must be addressed squarely. For all her vivid writing and journalistic effort, Naomi Klein’s monochrome synthesis promotes only a politics of evasion and despair. The world society that has developed in the last half-century has some features never seen before and many that are perennial. Any way forward will be worked out by China, Europe, the USA and regional leaders such as Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa. They will build on an existing diversity that is hardly illuminated by catch-all phrases like ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘American capitalism’.

We are in the middle of an economic disaster, alright. So far many of the politicians, bankers and CEOs who got us into this mess seem to be surviving, even prospering. But before long, people everywhere will be asking loudly ‘What happened to our money, our jobs and our houses? How did we let them get away with it? How can we make sure it doesn’t happen again?’ Things are likely to become a lot more turbulent yet, and debates about political economy will then need much more historical substance than Naomi Klein and the prevailing literary fashion seem able to offer at present.

* * * * * * * * * *

I do not argue that Naomi Klein’s lens is false. As an ideal type drawn from the contemporary world, it sheds some light on a brutal phase of capitalist imperialism that is mainly, but not exclusively American. It is true that poor black people have been sacrificed in New Orleans after Katrina or in Sri Lanka and Aceh after the tsunami and that many more of them are likely to suffer a similar fate in Haiti. It is equally true that Milton Friedman once authorized a particularly rapacious version of economics and that right-wing pressure groups like the Heritage Foundation exist. And the Pentagon, which is now running the show in Haiti, is the biggest socialist collective on the planet, a place where no-bid contracts are normal and competitive markets are anathema. But even its detractors admit that ‘neoliberalism’ is fairly recent and that Haiti’s problems are old. It is anachronistic to point simultaneously to the Katrina model of exploitation and to two centuries of US intervention in Haiti, as Stephen Lendman does.

The point of taking a wider perspective on world history than ‘disaster capitalism’ allows for is that the questions we must address take place on that scale, as well as in thousands of short-run local instances. Moreover, neoliberalism has been at least shaken by the financial collapse of 2008, an event that Klein’s theory failed to predict and cannot explain. But it is the immediate context for any discussion of what to do next. Private contractors making hay from disaster are real enough and deserve to be exposed; but they are not central to the current struggle the United States is waging against Asian, European, Middle Eastern and Latin American competitors for world domination. The principal explanation for what is going on in Haiti today is to be found in the Pentagon, State Department and CIA, not the Heritage Foundation’s policy pronouncements or the IMF for that matter. The prospect of a global pilgrimage of do-gooders into America’s Caribbean backyard is a nightmare for US foreign policy and counts for far more than the looting permitted by a US military umbrella.

The anthropologists of course immediately jump in to promote our case. We are the regional specialists and we have a proven method for reaching the people (living with them). We know the history (although we rarely teach it in our classes or write about it). Kerim Friedman has a good post in Savage Minds taking off from a New York Times oped piece by David Brooks where the latter said:

“Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences…Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.”

Which returns us to the question of world history and Kerim is right to insist that Brooks’ line is insidious. But it is doubly insidious in that Brooks deploys a logic and method that have dominated anthropology for the last century, static cross-cultural comparison. Barbados was England’s leading sugar producer in the 17th century, then it was succeeded by Jamaica; it never went through the kind of political upheavals that Jamaica subsequently did (and these were minor compared with Haiti). Haiti (Saint Domingue) produced a world revolution that CLR James argues in The Black Jacobins (1938) was just as significant as the American and the French. It was a successful black revolution in a world organized as a racial hierarchy with blacks at the bottom; and the Haitians were targeted with a ferocity comparable only to what the Bolsheviks endured, but without Russia’s vast population and land mass as protection.

The twentieth century saw two world revolutions in this sense: the Russian revolution and the anti-colonial revolution that overthrew European empire after the Second World War. Did you know that over twenty countries sent armies to subvert Russia’s revolution or how the ensuing war shaped that country’s development under Stalin? We know vaguely that the anti-colonial revolution was subverted in much of Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific (Latin America’s history operates on a different timescale), while much of Asia used it eventually to instal successful variants of capitalism. Haiti combines elements of both these twentieth-century revolutions with results that are as tragic as in the East Congo, but for much longer.

My point is that social or cultural anthropology is just as impotent as right-wing American journalism when searching for answers to the questions posed by this history, without even the excuse of trying to justify the status quo. This is because fieldwork-based ethnography threw out world history a century ago. Until we combine the two systematically, we will be powerless in the face of the Haitian disaster and could be said to be partly responsible for maintaining public ignorance of its causes.

In the meantime, anthropologists can sign up for Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine of disaster capitalism. She does not require them to know world history or even Haiti’s history. Her attitude feels right to people who probably entered the discipline because they were already alienated from capitalism as a system. Above all, her analysis does not articulate an intellectual or political program that would compel them to change their established ways. Like the ‘radical’ literati who endorse her books, anthropologists can continue to practice their (more poorly paid, even precarious) profession within a coocoon of vague political disaffection that holds out no promise of more effective understanding, even less of appropriate collective action.

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Now that world society is being formed as a single interactive network, we need to ask how it might be made more democratic, since democracy is universally acknowledged to be the only legitimate basis for our societies. The principle that those who are most affected by decisions should play the main part in making them is simple, but rarely realized in practice. Moreover, political democracy has often been subverted by economic inequality. Rather than follow the tradition that rejects markets and money because they are identified with capitalism, I prefer to explore their potential to sustain a more genuine economic democracy than at present. We express our desires democratically whenever we spend money; but this kind of voting is massively unequal, since some have so much more than others. The vast majority of people alive have hardly any money to spend at all. How much better it would be if we made our own money and voted with that. A radically new approach to money, offering individuals and communities more effective control in their own economic decision-making, is the most direct way to restore democracy to our participation in society.

Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas it is in fact a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead. We often recognize this aspect of money by speaking of it as if it had a life of its own, animating our lives for better or worse, more often the latter (Marx 1867). For some people, money is the root of all evil; for others it is the source of modern freedom. In both cases it makes the world go round. And this leads to a second point: money is associated with movement in space, with change, with the exchange of objects travelling great distances, in other words, with the market; and it is itself in movement through time, hence the history of money is an essential part of the history of society. Money is not one static thing or idea, much as we would all like it to stand still and be counted.

The standard definitions do not capture the most important feature of money, its evolution as a means of human interaction in society. Money is made by us, but for most people it has long been something scarce which we take passively whenever possible, without any sense of its being our collective creation. From having been an object produced by remote authorities, it is becoming more obviously a subjective expression of our own will; and this development is mirrored in the shift from ‘real’ to ‘virtual’ money. In the last 300 years or so, the money form has evolved from metallic coins through paper notes and ledger entries to electronic digits. In the process, it has become dematerialized, losing any shred of a claim that it is founded on the natural scarcity of precious metals. Even the authority of states, which stamped coinage and issued the notes we are still most familiar with as money, cannot long survive the electronic blizzard that is money in the age of the internet.

The idea is slowly taking root that society is less an oppressive structure out there and more a subjective capacity that allows each of us to learn how to manage our relations with others. Money is a good symbol of this shift. It first took the form of objects outside ourselves of which we usually had a greater need than the available supply; but of late it has increasingly been manifested as personal credit, in the form of digital transfers mediated by plastic cards and telephone wires, thereby altering the notions of economic agency that we bring to participation in markets. If modern society has always been supposed to be individualistic, only now perhaps is the individual emerging as a social force to be reckoned with. This claim rests on a single overwhelming fact, that large amounts of information concerning the participants in economic transactions at any distance can now be processed cheaply, thereby making possible the repersonalization of complex economic life (Hart 2001, 2005). In the process the assumptions that supported mass society for a century are being undermined.

The internet permits almost instantaneous communication between machines using microscopic circuits to process and store information. There are profound implications for the system of money. Now that the internet is no longer primarily a research tool, its use is increasingly as a electronic marketplace, making links between and within businesses and between them and their customers. Electricity travels at the speed of light and the transfer of information itself is essentially costless. This then is a market with unusual time and space dimensions, where the personal and impersonal aspects of economic life meet on new terms. Very little of social significance will be left untouched before long.

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. The saying goes that “information wants to be free” and certainly 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 has considerable consequence for the character of 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. If you drop a coin or banknote on the floor, whoever picks it up can spend it just as easily as you can. Money in this form is an instrument detached from the persons who use it. The expansion of trade often depended on this objectivity of the medium of exchange and economists have long debated whether money’s value derives from its being a scarce commodity or from the guarantees made by states who issued it (Hart 1986). Bank credit on the other hand has always been more directly personal, being linked to the trustworthiness of individuals and, in the case of paper instruments such as cheques, issued by them. 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 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 Relations Management (CRM) based on data banks that know no limit in scope. This enables them to target buyers who generate above average revenues, to remind them of the need to buy something for their wife’s birthday and so on. Nowhere has this process gone further than in the market for personal credit. A generation ago I relied on the bank manager to extend my purchasing power through making an overdraft available. Now the number and variety of financial instruments on offer is growing exponentially and these are often customized to my personal needs. The trend is definitely to restore personal identity to what were until not long ago largely impersonal contracts. Of course, rich and powerful organizations have access to huge processors with which to manipulate an often unknowing public. But at the very least, for many people, these developments have introduced new conditions of engagement with the impersonal economy. What matters is to recognize that the line between personal and impersonal society is shifting, with significant implications for individual and collective agency (Hart 2005).

Money may seem to be the problem, but it is also the solution. We have to find ways of organizing markets on the basis of equal exchange and that means detaching the forms of money from the capitalist institutions that currently define them. Instead of taking money to be something scarce beyond our control, we could begin to make it ourselves as a means of accounting for those exchanges whose outcomes we wish to calculate. Money would then become multiple sources of personal credit, building on the technology that has already given us plastic cards. All of this stands in stark contrast to state-made money, where citizens belong to one national economy whose currency is monopolized by a political class claiming the authority of representation to manage its volume, price and allocation.

Community currencies in general
Community currencies stand in contrast to conventional money whose sources are closed to most of us. There are many varieties of these, but their basic principles are simple and general. They are open in the sense that they can be created by any association choosing to come together for the purposes of exchange; they are free (libre) in the way that speech is, or ought to be, free. Whereas conventional money is a commodity kept artificially scarce by remote suppliers (the banks, regulated in turn by a central bank), a community currency is simply a measure of exchange whose supply is limited only by the willingness of participants to trade. In this way, the scope for what people do normally, buying and selling, is extended without the restrictions imposed by normal cash.

Community currencies are both a radical subversion of capitalism and its natural extension. It is possible, even necessary, to conceive of them as complementary to existing economic forms and interests, operating at present on a minute scale that offers scant threat to the status quo — so many mice running around the basement, as it were. Thus businesses may accept payment in local and national currencies together; participants in these exchange circuits often pay taxes on their transactions; small increments in human welfare are generated. These are markets based ultimately on the same law of contract as modern capitalism. Yet the forms of money involved are also sharply different. The money we are familiar with and have known for at least four thousand years is produced by remote agencies in amounts that ensure its scarcity. It is therefore a commodity with a value independent of its function as a means of exchange; it is loaned at a price (interest) and hoarded. The markets formed by this money proliferate everywhere, increasing the participants’ sense of their own powerlessness. Community currencies, on the other hand, are issued by people coming together in their own finite associations. There is no inherent restriction on their supply; individuals make them by finding others to trade with. The money does not drain away, but stays within the circuit as a source of future exchange. It is simply a measure with no independent value and thus cannot be transformed into capital. It expresses the word of each participant (whether individual, business or organization), not that of a central bureaucracy. Above all, whereas the social character of conventional money often appears as an anti-social force, the active principle of community currencies is co-operation in society (Karatani 2003).

The technical possibilities for linking community currency payment systems to the internet and to ‘the new economy’ of e-commerce are growing rapidly at this time. The economy emerging today is global, highly connected and favors intangibles, ideas over things. The most powerful technologies enhance soft relationships and decentralized modes of control. There are increasing returns to adding members to any given network; but the loss of an individual to that network matters little. The value of the network takes precedence over the value accumulated by individual units (Castells 2001). In the world of the internet, scarcity gives way to abundance and the common wealth grows fastest through an ethos of sharing and giving. Prices tend to fall towards being free (gratuit). It is an unstable world that rewards innovation, as well as excluding the many who cannot participate or who lose when they do. Community currencies, based as they are on well-established social principles, have the capacity of building bridges between everyday economic life and the opportunities arising in the new economy.

Community currencies have existed in one form or another for a long time. The principle of forming closed circuits of exchange through gifts of valuables is said to be much older than markets. We are familiar with contemporary examples of this such as the Northwest Coast potlatch and the kula ring of the Western Pacific. Utopian experiments in self-sufficient economic community, such as those associated with Robert Owen and William Morris in the nineteenth century, have been commonplace throughout the industrial age (Morris and Bax 1886). There are numerous modern examples of people inventing the means of exchange in the face of scarce money. In the 1970s a bank strike in Dublin was circumvented successfully by the expanded circulation of cheques as a substitute for currency. A wide variety of local experiments in social credit emerged during the Great Depression, often involving the invention of new currencies; these included in one place the circulation of pieces of deerskin known as ‘the buck’. Perhaps the best-known example from the inter-war period was the stamp scrip of Silvio Gesell in Austria, celebrated by Keynes in his General Theory (1936), itself a sustained exercise in the economics of circumventing the scarcity of conventional money. A Swiss complementary currency founded in 1934, the WIR, is still flourishing today as a means of trade between businesses (Greco 2001:67-8; see also Greco 2009).

LETS and ‘open money’
The late twentieth century saw another revival of this form, paradoxically in the leading centres of western capitalism. LETS, meaning ‘Let’s do it’, but later elaborated as Local Exchange Trading Systems, began in British Columbia in 1982-83 at the initiative of Michael Linton. This was in response to a temporary downturn in the local economy because of reduced demand for the defence industry and provincial government finances. Since then the LETSystem design has spread through the English-speaking countries and beyond, to France, Germany, Japan and Argentina. Many thousands of people have joined LETS systems which until now have generally been independent of each other. Most communities and even nation-states depend heavily on imports and exports and their internal economy has a weakly developed structure. Community currencies, on the other hand, sustain self-regulating economic networks allowing members to issue and manage their own money supply within a bounded system. As such, they may be conceived of as a way of closing off local communities from the market economy; but Linton has subsequently emphasized the need to integrate these circuits into existing commerce.

In LETS, people, businesses and organizations open accounts in one or several systems, with the unit of account, often named distinctively for local cultural resonance, made equivalent to the national currency for ease of calculation. Member accounts start at a zero balance with no deposit of normal money nor any requirement to buy before selling. No interest is paid or charged on balances. There is a register of members (which would normally include businesses as well as individuals and organizations), sometimes listing the services they offer. Payment for goods and services may be in some combination of local and national currency, with only the former being registered in the circuit. Transfers and balances are recorded by a registry which is a virtual bank with no ‘real’ money. Minimal administrative expenses are recovered from member accounts in community currency on a ‘cost of service’ basis. There is never any obligation to trade; and, if desired, members may know the balance and turnover of other members. In the latest stage of the technology, these transactions are recorded off-line on smart cards capable of registering a plurality of currencies and then communicated card-to-card via the internet. Any existing bank could perform this function for a large number of such networks, but they do not.

Each individual member listed on the common register issues the currency whenever the balance of their exchanges drops below zero. In doing so, they make a promise to honour their commitment, acknowledging the gift of goods or services made in return. At any moment, the totality of exchanges sums to zero. These multiple-issuer currencies are more robust than the conventional, single-issuer variety in that the ability of members to trade is not diminished by the disappearance — by default, migration, death or whatever — of accounts with substantial negative balances. Even so, trade can dry up if some members accumulate significant positive balances and find little to buy within the circuit. Most of all such a system offers a means of economic empowerment to individuals as members of communities brought together in a practical way through a circuit of exchange with its own medium of communication. This in turn is an education in citizenship of a new kind, where society may take the form of many levels of association, not just those depending on the economic monopoly of the nation-state.

A proper currency service provider would enable users to create their own systems in the space available and give them access to other similar systems. A stand-alone community currency is like a radio or TV that can only tune to one station, a computer with just one programme. Supporting trade between people who keep their accounts in different currencies requires that the registries can communicate with each other through a cross-clearing network. This would be operated primarily through the internet, using its own money domain naming system (MDNS). The MDNS proposed by Linton would start with national top-level domains responsible for the registration of regional sub-domains, which would be in turn responsible for local registration. This facility would be further enhanced by ‘multi-cc’ smart-card systems. The cards can currently carry up to 15 different currencies at a time, off-line and anonymous, and are designed to make community money systems easily adopted in the retail sector. The card system enables every participating business also to have a loyalty loop specific to their own business, if they choose. The combination of the cross-registry clearing and smart card systems would create a platform for virtually any form of open money. When the LETSystem software achieves a kernel of cross-platform protocols capable of defining the integrated platform of any application, it will become open source software, open money in the fullest sense. Of course, co-ordination in this area is difficult when there is no one body concerned with establishing standards.

A powerful ‘free (libre) and open source software’ movement (FLOSS) has emerged in recent years, building on the achievements of the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman and the founder of Linux, Linus Torvalds (Hart 2005). The latter is a free operating system that has gained phenomenal popularity in recent times because it allows users to modify software to suit their own needs. Linux is a collaborative effort of thousands of programmers interacting over the internet and is therefore not owned or controlled by any one company. By exposing software source code to peer review by a community of users quickly and often on the internet, it has posed a strong challenge to the closed business model of seeking to derive monopolistic rents from secret intellectual property. The robustness of the open source model lies in its being able to draw on a much larger pool of potential developers than could ever be employed by a single firm. In similar fashion, the spread of community currencies would benefit from sharing software developments and other forms of innovation within a community of associations using open money. Already community currency design, code and other relevant information has been made freely available for others to use and to contribute to its development. Moreover, like open source, these developments take place through an egalitarian (‘flat’) network rather than through hierarchical institutions. There are other parallels between the two cases. Open source appears to be a driven by a logic of giving and sharing, more than financial reward; and in circuits organized through community currencies concern with money prices is often secondary to the individual and collective purposes of exchange.

There is a paradox in my use of the terms open and closed in this context. For the majority of community currencies such as LETS the definitive principle is that the exchange circuits they sustain are closed. In contrast, the markets sustained by conventional money are open-ended networks of limitless extent, so that money seems to drain away to unseen centres of power that are invariably located elsewhere, leaving us powerless to prevent its passing. The whole point of LETS is that the purchasing power generated by trade comes round again to nourish the participating community; and it promotes internal production rather than the import/export pattern that predominates in mainstream markets. This becomes more obvious when the circuits are small, as they usually are, and when the community supporting a currency is a well-defined local area. But open money circuits may be scaled up to a much larger membership that could easily be dispersed around the internet. There are trade-offs between these poles of association, small- and large-scale, local and virtual, closed and open. Some may choose the intimacy of relations with those they know well, whereas others may prefer looser connection with a large pool of strangers. If they are to succeed, community currencies must embrace both poles. Thus, the greater control afforded by closed circuit networks needs to be offset by an open source approach to the software needed to operate community money. This dialectic of local community and global network, reflected in the combination of closed circuits of exchange and open distribution methods, has been a constant feature of LETS’ evolution over the past two decades.

The variety and limitations of community currencies
The general aim of community currencies is to enable trading and exchange, when purchasing power in the conventional market economy is especially defective. But clearly the form lends itself to a wide variety of social and ecological purposes whose rationale may not be narrowly economic in that sense. LETS and similar systems are differentiated in a number of ways. Of these the most important is the degree of integration in the national economy, but others include: the monetary measure (based on the national currency or on hours of work, for example); the organizers’ reliance on free or salaried labour or government grants; digital or material records of payment; involvement of businesses or exchange of services between individuals only; local or virtual association; forms of leadership and participation; and so on. Many LETS associations are reluctant to band together in case their autonomy is compromised. They still bear the hallmarks of Victorian philanthropy, aiming only at the poor, forming boards and committees, protecting their insular and clubby nature against all-comers. Such institutions are usually time-consuming and dogmatic, with a bias against business and for public grants. Their main motive appears to be to get away from the conventional economy into a separate world of their own, however small.

At another extreme, community currencies may, in their desire for economic integration, mimic national money so closely as to resemble it more than the family of currencies associated with the LETS movement. The Limehouse Townhall in London’s East End has been occupied since 2001 by a miscellaneous network of artists and activists. In October 2005 they launched a series of events known as the World Summit for Free Information Infrastructure (http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/). As part of their engagement in the local economy, they also launched their own currency, known as the lime. This is a bright green paper scrip similar in appearance to supermarket discount tokens. Denominations are 1, 2 and 5 units upwards and have purchasing power equal to the pound sterling. The lime circulates in the local community, where it is accepted by some shops and restaurants. These in turn may redeem the tokens for national currency whenever they choose; some of them offer a discount of ten percent to the issuing authority (not to the customers). Although it is intended as a permanent feature of local life, the lime is mainly used now as an event currency, with many goods and services available internally only in exchange for the community currency.

The organizers of the lime have discovered the joys of central banking: the sole issuer of the currency has the power to create money that did not exist before, to the extent that tokens are not immediately redeemed for normal cash. The scheme also has the merit of being easily understood by participants, some of whom may be just passing through the community; and it adds flexibility to local markets. Its drawbacks are those of conventional currency. The lime is impersonal, undemocratic in origin (single-issuer as opposed to multiple issuers), easily counterfeited and unconnected to the new information technologies. As such, it is a long way from LETS; but what it loses by mimicking the pound sterling, it gains in terms of cultural acceptance.

Persuasion and internalized models of community
Given the cultural longevity of conventional money and the powers of indoctrination held by ruling institutions, it is not surprising that most people are initially reluctant to embrace community currencies. People feel that the monopoly claimed by national money must be inevitable, since no-one would freely choose it. To be told there is an alternative that we could choose makes nonsense of a lifetime’s enslavement to an unrewarding system. So we cling to what we know as the only possibility. The central task, if community currencies are to make serious inroads into society, is to persuade the doubtful, by showing them that money can be made to work for them in practice, that it is the solution as well as the problem. The exchange of objects through money and that of meanings through language are now converging in a universal network of communications, the internet.

This is a world where people have a notoriously short attention span. It is not enough to develop a superb design for exchange circuits employing community currencies. People have to be sold the idea; and this involves a subtle engagement with what is old and new in their experience. The central role of persuasion or rhetoric in economy was understood by those who have most influenced our economic ideas and behaviour. Thus Adam Smith (1762) spent fifteen years lecturing on rhetoric and left instructions in his will for these lectures to be destroyed, presumably so that his Wealth of nations (1776), the founding text of economic science, would not be seen as the self-conscious literary artifact that it is. Maynard Keynes likewise devoted a dozen years to his Essays in persuasion (1931), trying to get across one simple message, that economic recovery would only come when the Victorian recipe of saving for capital accumulation was abandoned. His mantra was ’spend, don’t save; spend, don’t save. More than any sophisticated academic treatise, such as the General theory (1936), this rhetorical project accounts for the eventually favourable reception of his ideas. Now that we have all absorbed his message, the time is probably ripe for another one.

If one of the obstacles in the way of disseminating community currencies is the difficulty of persuading people consciously to adopt new ideas, another is the unconscious use of old models when designing new forms of association. The nation-state has enjoyed tremendous success as the dominant form of society over the last century or two, so much so that we have internalized its principles and reproduce them whenever we seek to construct new forms of community. I identify four ideal types of community, all of them assimilated within the synthetic notion of the nation-state (Hart and Munro 2000). The nation-state has been a political community capable of offering its citizens a single vehicle for relating to the world outside, as well as the framework of law regulating their internal affairs. It has been a community of place, resting on territorial principles of association with definite boundaries of land and sea. It has also been an imagined or virtual community, a constructed cultural identity relying on symbolic abstraction of a high order. It has finally been a community of interest, in both the subjective and objective senses, uniting members in trade and war by a shared purpose.

Given this extraordinary achievement in making society synonymous with a single form, it is not surprising that, when people come together to make alternatives to the national economy, they should unconsciously reproduce it in the design for their association — as a stand-alone multi-purpose community of like equals rather than, say, as a federated network of unequal social entities. We have already seen this in the contrast between the development of LETS as ‘open money’ and a singular currency such as the lime. Obviously, significant institutional success for community currencies depends on the discovery of complex hybrid forms, combining genuinely new principles with what people already know well.

Why now?
The principles underlying community currencies are timeless and universal, but is our moment in history particularly favourable to their diffusion now? In any case community currencies are to be found today mainly in the countries where capitalism is most deeply rooted, more than in the poorer countries. So this question entails the relationship between community currencies and capitalism.

Capitalism is a historical configuration of people, machines and money which in the twentieth century took the dominant form of ‘national capitalism’, the attempt to manage accumulation and markets through central bureaucracy (Hart 2001). It was an era of mass production and consumption, of heavy industries and centralization, when human destinies were tied to the impersonal institutions of states, capitalist markets and science. Recent advances in both connectedness and inequality mark a new stage of freedom for the owners of money, to which I give the tentative label, ‘virtual capitalism. The ‘globalization’ brought about by the digital revolution of the last two decades has undermined the pretension of states to control their national economies. In the process, long-distance trade in information services has overtaken manufactures as the main focus of economic growth and the money circuit has become increasingly detached from real production and exchange. The world holds its breath, wondering if this is a new stage of human evolution or a financial bubble whose end will engulf us all.

If Marx and Engels (1848) found in the circumstances of factory industry the social possibility of workers’ emancipation, the democratic potential of a community currencies movement should likewise be referred to the conditions generated by virtual capitalism. The cost of transferring information has been radically cheapened and this opens up the scope for peer-to-peer communications and exchange, even as it reinforces the powers of surveillance and control exercised by remote agencies. The financial revolution associated with plastic credit cards and similar instruments has introduced greater personal responsibility for the management of debt, within the constraints of the conventional banking system. For that part of the human population living in the heartlands of virtual capitalism, let us say the western middle classes for short, experience of new financial instruments, the internet, global telecommunications and travel, as well as the erosion of collective security by neo-liberal policies, have had a cumulative impact on individual and social consciousness. Given the rate of diffusion of the new technologies and the growing integration of world society, such consciousness is by no means limited to the western middle classes. We have reached a stage where the historical configuration of people, machines and money could sustain widespread adoption of a radical alternative.

It is perhaps predictable that the early development of community currencies has taken the form of defensive particularistic units offering a temporary refuge from the ravages of capitalism. Such groups normally emphasize relations of personal trust between members, a shared morality in contrast with the ruthless impersonality of the world outside. Harking back to the labour theory of value, some of them have based their measure of money on time (time dollars, Ithaca hours), thereby putting some distance between their exchanges and the national economy. It is also significant that these communities have usually been local and stress the value of policing the boundaries of face-to-face communities. This is what most people imagine community currencies imply; and indeed a substantial part of the movement will retain this character indefinitely. But virtual relations at distance and face-to-face communication reinforce each other in a complementary way and should not be posed as stark alternatives.

Nevertheless, the internet favours virtual association and the more progressive forms of open money that I have highlighted here are designed to allow for multiple combinations and considerable scale. Moreover, while the logic of community currencies, in contrast with conventional money, is intrinsically consistent with a more ethical social agenda, it is important to note that this operates through their abstract design and does not imply any particular type of behaviour from members. Money today is the way we keep track of a potentially bewildering number of contractual agreements linking us to a great variety of associations. It is a memory bank and I find it hard to conceive that we could dispense with this highly personal register of transactions. Nor would most of us be willing to devote large parts of each day to the social nuances of exchange. Community currencies must be built with this objective in mind. They can and should be designed to facilitate exchange reliably at low transaction cost. Individual responsibility comes in at the level of issuing and maintaining a shared currency, not as an ethical requirement that exchange should be personal or even particularly solidaristic.

Community currencies are inevitably small in scale at this stage. But they can be designed with the possibility of scaling up very much in mind. Once the principle of community currencies is seen to be viable, their growth as a sector of modern economies is likely to be rapid. In any case, participation is a learning exercise. They show what conventional money is and does to us, as well as providing opportunities to practice new relations between individual and society. By redesigning the money we live by, we send a message that other things matter more. Experience with LETS has already shown that, when people issue their own currency, the habit of trying to get more for less, of buying cheap and selling dear, dissolves and the real purposes of exchange take precedence over the money involved. Even so, it is a far cry from small experiments like this to the problem of global economic inequality and ecological instability. Community currencies may echo the principles animating the movements that must arise to address these problems (Hart 2004). They offer a source of political education, a means of social connection, perhaps a tool of economic improvement. It is impossible to predict how far or fast this experiment in economic democracy will spread.

Although community currencies are closely identified with the particular interests that bind people together in small-scale associations, we must not lose sight of humanity’s need to remake world society with people in mind. Money is the most universal means of communication we have and the kind of society it reflects is at once both universal and particular. Past projections of unversality, whether made in the name of the Catholic church, colonial empire or neo-liberal ideology, have eliminated cultural particulars in order to dominate them. It is time that we made a society whose universality is realized through its constituent particulars. The principle of such a society could be reproduced in microcosm through the design of community currencies.

Oliver Cromwell established a Commonwealth in 1649 after the English Civil War. It was a government formed with the common consent of the people and was intended to replace the old regime of absolute monarchy and aristocratic rule. British democracy never recovered from the counter-revolution of 1660 (the restoration of the monarchy). But the American democracy subsequently retained the spirit and sometimes the name of that original Commonwealth. And it persists as the title of the largest and most diverse voluntary association of nation-states in the world today, following the break-up of the British empire. In the work of John Locke (1690), whose political philosophy did so much to inform the English-speaking democracies, ‘commonwealth’ referred not just to the form of government, but to what we might call ‘the public good’, the welfare of all citizens. Today the great corporations command our unequal world with all the haughty power and indifference to human welfare that was once the hallmark of the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary France. For us, however, ‘commonwealth’ can no longer refer to anything less than democratic self-government by humanity as a whole; and economic democracy, in thousands of measures, large and small, is indispensable to achieving that end.

What then does the term ‘common wealth’ mean in the context of the community currencies movement? What is the ‘wealth’. Not the money itself, for sure. Money, conceived of as a commodity with its own value to be hoarded and deployed as an instrument of power, as capital, is the opposite of open money. Nor is the collectivization of such capital in the manner of twentieth century socialist regimes remotely appropriate either. Rather, the wealth to be mobilized is the human creativity in all of us, resources that have been ill-used for too long, because of the money regime we have been forced to live by. This creativity belongs to each individual, but it can only be realized in society, together. Society should be conceived of as a multitude of levels of association and many of these could take the form, as one of their dimensions, of a community with its own circuit of exchange and money. Economic democracy in this limited sense would point us to more inclusive forms of polity; and then perhaps the dream of abundance that has long inspired humanity would be realized as more than just the riches of a few.

References

Castells, Manuel The internet galaxy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Cook, Chris ‘Asset-based finance – a capital idea’, Open Capital, September 2005, http://www.opencapital.net/papers/asset-based.htm.

Dodd, Nigel ‘Reinventing monies in Europe’, Economy and Society, 34 (4), 2005.

Greco, Thomas Money: understanding and creating alternatives to legal tender, Burlington VT, Chelsea Green, 2001.

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, Burlington VT, Cherlsea Green, 2009.

Hart, Keith ‘Heads or tails? Two sides of the coin’, Man, December, 1986.

Money in an unequal world: Keith Hart and his memory bank, New York and London, Texere, 2001 (first published as The memory bank, London, Profile, 2000).

A tale of two currencies’, Anthropology Today, 18(1), 2002.

Organic trade: towards a global green currency?’, Ecology & Farming, June-August 2004.

The hit man’s dilemma: or business, personal and impersonal, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm, 2005.

Hart, Keith and Gillian Munro ‘The Highland problem’: state and community in local development, Aberdeen, Arkleton Research Papers, No. 1, 2000.

Karatani, Kojin Transcritique: on Kant and Marx, Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2003.

Kelly, Kevin New rules for the new economy, New York, Penguin, 1998.

Kennedy, Margrit Interest and inflation free money, Seva International, 1995, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/kennedy/english/.

Keynes, Maynard Essays in persuasion, New York, Norton, 1991 [1931].

A general theory of employment, interest and money, London, Macmillan, 1936.

Lietaer, Bernard The future of money: a new way to create wealth, work and a wiser world, London, Random House, 2001.

Locke, John Two treatises of government, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960 [1690].

Malinowski, Bronislaw Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London, Dutton, 1922.

Marx, Karl ‘The fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof’, Capital Volume 1, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1979 [1867]: 71-83.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels Manifesto of the communist party, 1848, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/.

Mauss, Marcel ‘Essai sur le don’, Sociologie et anthropologie, Paris, PUF,1950 [1925].

Morris, William and E. Belfort Bax Socialism: its growth and outcome, chapter 13 ‘The utopists: Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier’, New York, Charles Scribner, 1899 [1886]; see http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1886/sru/ch13.htm.

Nishibe, Makoto ‘The theory of labour money: implications of Marx’s critique for the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS)’, in Hiroshi Uchida Editor, Marx for the 21^st Century, London, Routledge, 2005: 89-105.

Servet, Jean-Michel Une économie sans argent: les systèmes d’échange local, Paris, Seuil, 1999.

Smith, Adam Lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres (Volume 4 of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence), 1762, http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0141-05.php.

An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, London, Methuen, 1961 [1776].

This paper was originally published in French through a collection edited by Jerome Blanc, Exclusion et liens financiers: monnaies sociales (Economica, Paris, 2006). Any knowledge I have of community currencies has been greatly expanded by association in the period 200-2002 with Michael Linton and Ernie Yacub whose Open Money project still seems to me the most promising initiative in this field.

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I want to start with Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch (1795). He held that Cosmopolitan Right, the basic right of all world citizens, should rest on conditions of universal hospitality, that is, 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. The contrast with our routine experience of international travel today could not be more marked. 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 by the man who more than anyone founded anthropology as an academic discipline, can now be seen to be a product of the high point of the liberal revolution, before it was overwhelmed by its twin offspring, industrial capitalism and the nation state. We now live in a less confident world, but it can still generate moments that touch our universal humanity, like the first man to orbit the earth in space or a Chinese man confronting a tank on global television.

Kant believed that human co-operation in society required us to rely on personal judgement moderated by common sense, in the double meaning of shared intelligence and taste. This common sense, also the title of his contemporary Tom Paine’s (1776) revolutionary pamphlet that launched the American war of independence, was generated in everyday life, in shared social experience (good food, good talk, good company). Earlier he 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.

The world is much more socially integrated today than two centuries ago and its economy is palpably unjust. We have barely survived three world wars (two hot, one cold) and brutality provokes fear everywhere. Moreover, the natural (we would say “ecological”) consequences of human actions are likely to be severely disruptive, if left unchecked. Histories of the universe we inhabit do seem to be indispensable to the construction of institutions capable of administering justice worldwide. When Roy Rappaport wrote recently that “Humanity·is that part of the world through which the world as a whole can think about itself”, he was repeating the central idea of Kant’s prescient essay. The task of building a global civil society for the 21st century is an urgent one and anthropological visions must play their part in that.

For some time now I have been wondering what it would be like to study world society , either as a seeker of Enlightenment like Kant or even as an academic anthropologist. This essay is mainly about the methods we might adopt for that purpose. Method comes from Greek meta-hodos, meaning before (or after) the road, preparation for a journey or perhaps its destination. Each of us makes an idiosyncratic journey through life and absorbs a personal version of society in the process. The life journeys of anthropologists are more varied than most. So, what version of society do we end up with and how? Could it be improved upon if some of us made it an explicit vocation to study world society as such? But, before discussing how to study world society, it might be worth reflecting on why now is an appropriate time to start doing so.

Between agrarian civilization and the machine revolution

I maintain that world society was formed as a single interactive network in the second half of the 20th century and that the digital revolution in communications during the 1990s was its effective culmination. That makes us the first generation to experience world society as such and therefore the first to have a chance to study it. We might want to call the study of world society ‘anthropology’. What has anthropology been until now and what might it become?

Anthropology in the 18th century was a philosophical enquiry into human nature as the foundation for a democratic alternative to the unequal societies of agrarian civilization. Its founders were Rousseau (particularly with the Discourse on inequality, 1754) and Kant. The dominant paradigm shifted in the 19th century. Anthropology now explained western imperialism’s easy conquest of world society in terms of a racial hierarchy whose evolution was revealed by speculative history. After the first world war, the principle of nationalism was established everywhere and anthropology’s chief method shifted as a result to ethnography, to writing about peoples considered to be naturally bounded units, symbolic microcosms of the nation-state. There was no world society as such in the 20th century, just the wars of nations and their subsequent attempts to form associations with themselves as principal actors. So what might anthropology become in the 21st century? That is the question I would like to explore here. But I must first outline my vision of how we arrived at this conjuncture.

In the last 200 years, the human population has increased six times and the rate of growth of energy production has been double that of the population. Many human beings work less hard, eat better and live longer today as a result. Whereas about 97% of the world’s people lived in the countryside in 1800 and no region could sustain more than a tenth of its people in towns, half of humanity lives in cities today. This hectic disengagement from the soil as the chief object of work and source of life was made possible by harnessing inanimate energy sources to machines used as converters. Before 1800 almost all the energy at our disposal came from animals, plants and human beings themselves. The benefits of this machine revolution have been unequally distributed and the prime beneficiaries have been the same pioneers of western imperialism. Since uneven development has been continuous during this period, we need markers to support any claim that globalization in the second half of the 20th century was of a distinct order again from what preceded it.

The1860s saw a transport and communications revolution (steamships, continental railways and the telegraph) that decisively opened up the world economy. In the same decade a series of political revolutions gave the leading powers of the coming century the institutional means of organizing industrial capitalism. These were the American civil war, Italy’s Risorgimento, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the formation of the Anglo-Indian superstate and Britain’s democratic reforms at home, Japan’s Meiji Restoration, German unification and the French Third Republic. Karl Marx published Capital in 1867 and the First International was formed then. The concentration of so many epochal events in such a short time would indicate a degree of integration of world society. But in the 1870s, the share of GNP attributable to international trade has been estimated as not more than 1% for most countries; and the most reliable indicator of Britain’s annual economic performance was still the weather at harvest-time. The ‘great depression’ beginning in 1873 turned out likewise to be an effect of American and German competition on the rate of return of British capital, while the rest of the world’s regions were booming. A century later in 1973, so great was the dependence of all national economies on world trade that the OPEC oil price rise set in train a universal economic depression from which we have still not recovered. Shortly afterwards, money futures markets were invented and by the millennium, international trade itself accounted for only a small fraction of the money exchanged globally; and national governments were mostly adrift in a rising tide of money, known simply as ‘the markets’, conveyed at the speed of light over telephone wires as so many electronic bits.

Capitalism has always rested on an unequal contract between owners of large amounts of money and those who make or buy their products. This contract depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labour or people fail to pay their creditors. The owners cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. Perhaps Karl Marx’s most vivid contribution to our understanding of the modern world was his observation that capitalism was actually feudalism in drag, with the owners of the means of production still extracting surplus labour from workers under threat of coercion. By the mid-19th century it became clear that the machine revolution was pulling unprecedented numbers of people into the cities, where they added a wholly new dimension to traditional problems of crowd control. The revolutions of the 1860s were based on a new and explicit alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class to form states capable of managing industrial workforces, that is, to keep the new urban masses to an unequal labour contract. This was a stark reversal of the opposition between capitalists and landowners that had fueled the liberal revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, giving rise to its intellectual consolidation in classical political economy. Germany and Japan provided the clearest examples of this new national alliance of classes. I call the phase of world society inaugurated by the revolutions of the 1860s ’state capitalism’, the attempt to manage markets and accumulation by means of national bureaucracies. It became general as a result of the first world war and it may or may not be decaying in the face of globalization today.

Despite a consistent barrage of propaganda telling us that we now live in a modern age of science and democracy, our dominant institutions are still those of agrarian civilization, the unequal society that ruled the world for 5,000 years before the machine revolution — territorial states, embattled cities, landed property, warfare, racism, bureaucratic administration, literacy, impersonal money, long-distance trade, work as a virtue, world religion and the family. This is because the rebellion of the western middle classes against the old regime that gave us the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, as well as the English, American and French democratic revolutions, has been co-opted by state capitalism and, as a result, humanity’s progressive emancipation from unequal society has been reversed in the last century and a half. Nowhere is this more obvious than when we contemplate the shape of world society as a whole today. A remote elite of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, “the men in suits”, rules masses who are predominantly poor, dark, female and young. The rich countries, who can no longer reproduce themselves, frantically erect barriers to stem the inflow of migrants forced to seek economic improvement in their midst. In most respects our world resembles nothing so much as the old regime in France before the revolution, when Rousseau wrote his Discourse on inequality, in fact.

The world is now simultaneously more connected than ever and growing more unequal. This only seems counter-intuitive to us because we have been conditioned by the cultural logic of nationalism. There is a contrast between the statistical assumptions that once underlay the construction of national society and those allowing us to make sense of the formation of world society now. Whereas the former were static and homogeneous, being based on egalitarian principles of random selection and the normal distribution, contemporary approaches to the dynamics of networks assume growth with preferences and a power rule, marked by extreme inequality, with a few major hubs and many weakly connected nodes. That is, the proliferation of networks, as in world markets today, would normally produce a highly skewed distribution of participants. The reduction of national political controls over global markets in the last two decades seems to have accelerated the gap between the haves and the have-nots everywhere, generating huge regional disparities in the process. The task of devising institutions capable of redressing this situation seems further away today that it did in 1945.

The United States and Britain launched a war against Iraq, for the second time in just over a decade, at the time when I first wrote this essay. Iraq is of course another name for Mesopotamia, the heartland of Gordon Childe’s ‘urban revolution’ inaugurating agrarian civilization 5,000 years ago. It didn’t seem likely then that the old regime’s grip over human minds would be erased by bombing Baghdad nor does it now. Indeed nationalcapitalism, as practiced by undemocratic rulers everywhere, still poses a deadly threat to our embryonic world society. What follows, in contrast to this bombardment of our minds by continuing violent exercises of power, are some reflections on the possible forms of a humane enquiry into our world today. It takes off from the historical vision I have just sketched, but its spirit is more existential than political as such. I am less concerned with what is out there than with how each of us might make a meaningful connection with it.

A journey in the world

Each of us embarks on a journey outward into the world and inward into the self. We are, as Durkheim 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, becomes an aspect of our socialization, brings lived society into our sources of introspection. Now it is feasible for some individuals to leave different social experiences in separate compartments; but one method for understanding world society would be to make an ongoing practice of trying to synthesize these varied experiences. If a person would have an identity, would be one thing, oneself, this entails an attempt to integrate all the fragments of social experience into a more coherent whole, a world in other words, as singular as the self.

So there are as many worlds as there are individuals and their journeys; and, even if there were only one out there, each of us changes it whenever we make a move. This model of Kantian subjectivity, at once personal and cosmopolitan, should be our starting point; but it will not do for the study of world society. For much of my professional life, I have shadowed the African diaspora through an Atlantic world whose defining moment was slavery: I have lived for some time in England, Ghana, the Cayman islands, Liberia, the USA, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, France, Scotland, Brazil and Norway. At some point — it was actually in Jamaica during the late 80s — I realized that what I was learning in the Caribbean helped me to integrate the other three legs of my journey to date (Europe, West Africa and North America), to see a pattern of relations. I saw how America was ‘new’, Europe and Africa ‘old’ and the Caribbean somehow both; and my guide was C.L.R. James who had traveled between all four points himself, leaving behind a series of books that were a revelation to me.

I was sitting on a beach in Jamaica reading a collection of James’s occasional writings on cricket. The place had once belonged to Errol Flynn. My daughter was playing on the edge of the sea. James had been Neville Cardus’s deputy as the Manchester Guardian’s cricket correspondent in the 1930s. I found myself reading about my father’s heroes in the Lancashire cricket team of that period as if it was today’s sports news. I had been devouring everything I could by James since I came to Jamaica to help establish a new graduate school for social science research. I knew that he had lived in Lancashire when he left Trinidad for Britain. It occurred to me that we had lived in the same places — the Caribbean, Britain, America, Africa — in a different sequence, at different times and with very different trajectories. Now, watching my daughter play on that exotic beach, with my father’s stories from childhood coming alive again, the gap between this old black man and myself was collapsed into a single moment by the compelling immediacy of James’s prose. Generation and racial difference were erased in an epiphany of timeless connection. I felt compelled to meet him and so I wrote the first and only fan letter of my life.

I trace my self-reinvention as an anthropologist to that moment. I have long felt that the collective slogans under which my anthropologist colleagues make professional claims on the public are much less rich and interesting that their individual lives. This is not to say that I or any of my colleagues don’t have a complex relationship to the ethnographic tradition, just that our methods and sources are much broader and more idiosyncratic than we often let on. Some time after my Jamaican epiphany, I was able to place myself at different points in my Atlantic journey by an act of the imagination, even in several places at once. I think of this visualizing process as ‘cubist’, the ability to see the picture from several perspectives at once. Caribbean people, whose history of movement has never given them the security of viewing the world from one place, developed this capacity without benefit of art or anthropology. Perhaps I learned this cubist practice from following the Africa diaspora through the main points of their Middle Passage. Atlantic history has some claim to being the crucible of modern world history; but it is not the world. Nor is movement in the world the world itself.

World society as an object of study

How can we approach world society as a whole? Well, we can give it a singular name. Bush the Elder announced, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that we now live in a New World Order. Later, in their bestseller of that name, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri announced the arrival of Empire, a united form of global sovereignty meant to supervise a neo-liberal world economy. Immediately, the destruction of the World Trade Centre played on television screens everywhere and we learnt that we were all to be part of Bush the Younger’s ‘war on terrorism’, even if this hardly seemed to be the denationalized version of universal sovereignty Hardt and Negri had in mind. It does not pay to confuse social reality with simple ideas; and I for one think of the unity of world society more as a potential than as a fact.

We tend to think and talk of society as an economy these days. Globalization is usually taken to refer to the reduction of political barriers to trade and the consequent freedom of capital to move where it will. Certainly networks established through buying and selling are more far-reaching than ever before, lending some credibility to the idea of a ‘world market’. And money itself, increasingly detached from any objective form, circulates the globe without territorial restriction, a rising tide capable of swamping national economies at any time. This apotheosis of capital is closely tied to the development of global communications. The convergence of telephones, television and computers into a single digital technology has already produced as its great symbol the internet, the network of networks, expanding faster than any previous innovation in this field. Mobile telephones have brought instant communication to places where expensive landlines were underdeveloped. And global TV audiences for major sporting events are well over the 2 bn mark, meaning that as many people now sometimes watch the same thing at once as were alive on the planet in 1945.

Mention of the population explosion should remind us that statistics were invented to allow states to count their people. It would have seemed odd in 1861 to generalize in quantitative terms about some feature of the Italian people as a whole; but we now easily absorb the information that Italian women have the lowest fertility rate in the world. United Nations organizations have been collecting statistics about world population for some time; but we are not yet habituated to think in terms of them, except perhaps for the total (six billions and climbing·). Quantity has been made social in some areas more than others. Counting heads, money, time or energy is more plausible than measuring the quality of life, for example, although this has not prevented economists from attempting the latter task.

When it comes to saying something about world society using these indicators, there is much controversy concerning the measures used. But the real issue is whether we think the present condition of humanity is scandalous or not. Thus Robert Wade, against the prevailing orthodoxy that the liberalization of markets is the best antidote to poverty, has attempted to establish that world society is growing more unequal. I have suggested that the world is divided into a club of rich countries (the OECD) constituting about 15% of the global population and the rest, the poor masses who have hardly any money to spend (45% have less than $2 a day to live on). Moreover, this division is marked by race, region, age and gender as well as by wealth, leading me to argue that contemporary world society resembles nothing so much as the old regime of pre-revolutionary France.

We can say something about the changing morphology of human society too. Anthropologists have known about social networks at least since the Manchester School. But the idea that social relations are now more readily constituted as open-ended networks than as closed corporate hierarchies is more recent. No-one has done more to argue the case than Manuel Castells:

“A network is a set of interconnected nodes. Networks are very old forms of human practice, but they have taken on a new life in our time by becoming information networks, powered by the Internet. Networks have extraordinary advantages as organizing tools because of their inherent flexibility and adaptability, critical features in order to survive and prosper in a fast-changing environment. This is why networks are proliferating in all domains of the economy and society, outcompeting and outperforming vertically organized corporations and centralized bureaucracies·. Networks were primarily the reserve of private life; centralized hierarchies were the fiefdoms of power and production. Now, however, the introduction of computer-based information and communications technologies, and particularly the Internet, enables networks to deploy their flexibility and adaptability, thus asserting their evolutionary nature. At the same time, these technologies allow the coordination of tasks, and the management of complexity. This results in an unprecedented combination of flexibility and task performance, of coordinated decision-making and decentralized execution, of individualized expression and global, horizontal communication, which provide a superior organizational form for human action.”

The implications of this idea for the study of world society are profound, even if its premises may be challenged. Is this the catalyst inaugurating Kant’s Perpetual Peace, the cosmopolitan society whose human preconditions he explored in his Anthropology (1798), which more than any other book established the name of our discipline? Are we reaching the end of a world system of territorial states? If so, how will the law be administered? One way would be for networks to constitute themselves as self-regulating clubs. Notions of justice can be disseminated without a centralized administration. Nor should we imagine that network society is necessarily non-hierarchical or open, for that matter. A recent popular text, Linked: the new science of networks by A-L Barabasi, claims that ’scaled networks’ in a wide range of fields — social, technological and biological — conform to a mathematical model known as a power rule in which a few nodes (hubs) are highly connected and most are only weakly so. Think of the air transport network of the United States, for example, with its O’ Hares and thousands of small airports. Such a model would explain why, left to its own devices, a world economy made up of unregulated market networks is becoming more connected and more unequal at the same time.

Worlds of the imagination

It is not as if the problem of managing the infrastructure of world society would be entirely new. We already have the precedent of global institutions devised in the twentieth century, after the first and second world wars. But there are others too. Several countries or federations of states are so large, so diverse and so self-contained as to constitute worlds in their own right. The United States, Russia, China, India and Brazil come to mind, while the European Union is the most dynamic political experiment on the planet. We could add to these examples some of the larger states formed in temperate zones by the British and Spanish empires or indeed any polity predicated on combining diversity. If we want to imagine what a world society might look like, we could examine these cases and ask which features should be adopted on a more inclusive scale. For our task is to make a better world society than the one we have, defined as it is by the myopia of national consciousness. We will discover that the modern principle of federalism is as old as that of the nation-state and much better suited to wide political association. The original word for society itself, societas , was for the Latins a loose-knit federal network, much less centralized than the constitution of the United States or Switzerland.

Making a better society means using the imagination for purposes of fiction, the construction of possible worlds out of actual experience. And this should remind us that thinking about the macrocosm is made easier through contemplation of microcosms. Alienation is an inability to make a meaningful link between ourselves and the world; and we need symbolic devices to bridge that gap. Works of fiction provide us with such devices. Novels and movies compress the world into a narrow stereotyped format that we enter subjectively on our own terms. In doing so, we encounter history without that crushing sense of being overwhelmed by remote forces. Whereas old versions of the universal (the Catholic church, European empire, economics) sought to dominate and replace particular varieties, the new universal will only be reproduced through cultural particulars. Great works of fiction show us this new concept of the universal, becoming more general as they plunge deeper into the circumstances of particular times and places. I have long thought that an anthropology of fiction would ask, not how specific works represent real societies, but how they construct convincing worlds of their own. The same question could be posed of the best ethnographies. And as a precedent for such an enquiry we could turn to Rousseau’s extraordinary inventions of the 1760s: the Social Contract, Emile, the New Heloise and the Confessions, through which he revolutionized European thinking about politics, education, sexuality and the self, each time with a new genre of fiction and each time pointing to a better world.

If society is hard to imagine, because it is inside us, not out there as we often believe, then we can follow Durkheim’s prescription and make an external object of it, as nature. The world may be considered scientifically as an ecology, a biological system, our habitat and home; and humanity is that part of life on earth that can think, the frontal lobes of the biomass, as it were. This confers on our species a certain duty of stewardship. And it does seem that a green political agenda is more likely to mobilize humanity to do something about worsening world conditions than any attempt to address global social problems directly. I like to pose the following hypothetical question. Which news item is more likely to provoke the public’s moral indignation: grey seals dying of oil pollution in the North Sea or a Mozambican killed by skinheads in East Germany? It is really no contest, since nature is out there and racism is inside all of us. Again, if global warming does melt the ice caps, the fate of coastal cities will be urgent enough perhaps to provoke some sort of global framework for collective action to materialize eventually. Humanity has apparently survived the threat of nuclear holocaust, for now, in part because it provoked a substantial international peace movement. Here then is one likely focus for a world society animated by activist networks — the mitigation of global risks.

At another level, the last half century saw us leave the planet’s surface for the first time and generated concrete images of how the earth looks from outer space, a powerful symbol of human unity indeed. And natural science locates that unity in an intellectual vision that has given us, among other things, the machine revolution whose uneven development is the underlying fact of the last two centuries, drawing humanity into ever closer association. There are those (like Bruno Latour) who would assimilate this ‘mononaturalism’ and its twin, a condescending multi-culturalism (we understand the unity of nature, so they can have their little cultures) to a vision of western imperialism. Certainly there are few anthropologists today ready to sign up for the hegemony of natural science. So here too we have a pressing topic for discussion when we study world society.

A way forward for anthropology?

Of course, the peoples who were forcefully incorporated into world society by western imperialism in the 19th century have not been outside modern history during the last one. They have been making it. If we are looking for continuing evidence of the cosmopolitan tradition in anthropology, we should look to the intellectuals of the anti-imperialist movement, like C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon, who aspired to extend the achievements of western civilization to all humanity. None of these was greater than Mohandas K. Gandhi. Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was devastating. He believed that it disabled its 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 an anthropology based on two universal postulates: that every human being is a unique personality and as such participates with the rest of humanity in an encompassing whole (the individual and the species of Kant’s essay). Between these extremes lie proliferating associations of great variety. As an Indian who had absorbed much that the West has to teach, Gandhi settled on the village and therefore on agricultural society as the most appropriate social vehicle for human development.

This backward-looking solution to the problem of the modern world makes Gandhi a typical 20th century figure. But the problem he confronted has been largely ignored by social theorists. It is this. If the world of society and nature is devoid of meaning, being governed by remote impersonal forces known only to specially trained experts, that leaves each of us feeling small, isolated and vulnerable. Yet modern cultures tell us that we are personalities with significance. How do we bridge the gap between a vast, unknowable world, which we experience as an external object, and a puny self endowed with the subjective capacity to act alone or with others? 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 chose the village as the site of India’s renaissance because it was where most Indians lived, but more importantly because it had a social scale appropriate to self-respecting members of an agrarian civilization. Moreover, he 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.

What then might anthropology become in the twenty-first century? My guess is that the general premise of universal movement will lead people to seek stable order in the least and most inclusive levels of human existence, that is in the self as an identity and the world as a unity; and especially in the construction of a meaningful relationship between the two. This is close to Durkheim’s idea of religion as a bridge between the known and the unknown. We are each unique personalities and the world is, at least potentially, composed of humanity as a whole. We have hitherto put an enormous effort into exploring the varieties of classification and association that mediate these extremes. This was not the priority of the liberal founders of anthropology and it may not be the priority of students in future. If I were to name what the focus of a future anthropology might be, I would choose ’subjects in history’ or perhaps ’self-in-the-world’.

There would be plenty of scope in such an anthropology for a world history whose antecedents cross-cut the discipline’s previous periods and paradigms. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men could well be taken as the basic text for an historical anthropology of unequal world society, with Morgan and Engels providing 19th century versions of the same and Eric Wolf, Jack Goody, Raymond T. Smith and others updating the project for late 20th century audiences. But our contemporary concern with subjectivity will require such grand narratives to be accompanied by individual and collective life histories of the sort pioneered by Sidney Mintz in Worker in the Cane and Richard Werbner in Tears of the Dead. Brian Alleyne’s collective biography of North London’s New Beacon Circle, Radicals Against Race, is another example from nearer home.

One might ask what anthropologists would actually do when they study world society. Let us assume that ethnographic fieldwork of the kind that we are now familiar with will remain an important source of professional knowledge. But this practice is coming under considerable political pressure. Each us of us will try to resolve the problem in our own way. In my own case, I restricted the method of prolonged fieldwork to one stay in Ghana of two and half years, when I started out. Since then, I have preferred to visit new places under the auspices of a job rather than as a researcher. People expect visitors to do something for them these days and I would rather struggle with the bias of a known public position than try to explain that I am not a CIA spy. I have been most often a teacher or a development consultant in the employ of governments or international agencies. For the last decade, I have lived in Paris without either a job there or any pretension to carrying out local research. Recently I bought a secondary home on the beach in South Africa, where I have two honorary chapirs following retirement. Wherever I am, I read a lot and I write. At the same time, I spend a good part of my life online. It is becoming ever more feasible to make universal connection without physical movement, without leaving home. All of this adds up to social experience. I make an anthropology out of that. Fortunately, I have had institutional support for this pretension. As Meyer Fortes said, after he helped to set up his trade union, the Association of Social Anthropologists of the U.K., “Social anthropology is what social anthropologists do” and he had the means of establishing their credentials. I am acutely aware that this trajectory is not readily available to others entering the discipline now. I just hope that each of you takes personal advantage of the historical opportunities and are not crushed by the constraints.

Kant’s Copernican revolution revisited

I must return to Kant’s great example which has been inexcusably omitted from most modern accounts of anthropology’s history. 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. Which is to say that the world is inside each of us as much as it is out there. This is why one definition of ‘world’ is ‘ all that relates to or affects the life of a person’. Our task is to bring the two poles together as subjective individuals who share the object world in common with the rest of humanity.

The 19th and 20th centuries, in identifying society with the state, constitute a counter-revolution against Kant’s Copernican revolution. This was launched by Hegel, whose Philosophy of Right (1821) contains the programmes of all three founding fathers of modern social theory (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) rolled into one. This counter-revolution was only truly consummated after the first world war. The result was a separation of the personal from the impersonal, the subject from the object, humanism from science. It was enshrined in the academic division of labour and it is why most of you have never heard before of Kant’s seminal contribution to anthropology. This is the split that the decline of state capitalism in the face of the digital revolution might allow us to reverse. In my book, The Memory Bank, I argued that the cheapening of the cost of information transfers as a result of the digital revolution makes it possible for much more information about individuals to enter into commercial transactions at distance that were until recently largely impersonal. This repersonalization of the economy has its counterpart in many aspects of contemporary social life, not just in the forms of money and exchange. It involves a new idea of the person, one that is based on digital abstractions as much as on the emergence of more concrete forms of individuality. The customized interactions that most academics now have with amazon.com and similar suppliers of books reflect this trend, at the same time personal and remote.

I do not imagine that I am alone in responding to our moment of history in this way. Elsewhere I have commented on a collection of papers about teaching anthropology which reveals the steps academic professionals are already taking to incorporate Kantian subjectivity into their methods. Clearly one consequence of the use of new technologies in teaching is that learning can now be much more individualized and ecumenical at the same time; and this juxtaposition of self and the world in itself poses a threat to the traditions of the academic guild. Here then is one source of a renewed emphasis on subjectivity. It all adds up to a radical revision of conventional attitudes to subject-object relations, grounds indeed for us to reconsider the positivist dogmas on which so many modern university disciplines are based, including social anthropology’s paradigm of scientific ethnography.

It has long been obvious to me that learning anthropology would be impossible if we were not, each of us, human beings in the first place. Anthropologists who once could rely on public ignorance as support for their exotic tales must now cope with mass mobility and communications. We have to consider seriously what our expertise can offer that is not delivered more effectively through novels and films, journalism or tourism. We live in a time when both the rhetoric and the reality of markets encourage individuals to choose the means of their own Enlightenment. It would be surprising if trends in the teaching of anthropology did not reflect all this; and many of my colleagues are responding to the challenge by pushing back the boundaries of anthropological education.

It is now two decades since the end of the Cold War and the social consequences of that war are just beginning to filter through. One feature of the post-war universities has been the rise of research as a means of evaluating the status of institutions and their individual members. This was led by state and corporate funding of armaments-related research in the natural sciences during the period of the Cold War. The social sciences, without the same funding or prestige, followed suit. Social anthropology was no different. Teaching was marginalized to the point of professional insignificance. It is time for anthropologists to take an interest in teaching again, not just as a way of improving the service they give to their students, but as part of their own intellectual development. I would suggest that the trend is already moving against corporate funding of large academic research enterprises; and that the universities are entering a period in which they will attract a new public interested in lifetime self-education or die. The humanities in general and anthropology in particular are well-placed to take advantage of such a trend. All is not lost. But our methods will have to change significantly and Kant’s Copernican revolution is one beacon lighting the way.

I have made a case here for research and writing, teaching and learning in anthropology to be existentially motivated. This entails a self-conscious revival of the western liberal tradition that culminated in Kant. There is nothing wrong with this tradition except that its best slogans were hijacked, following the machine revolution, by industrial states bent on imperialism and class warfare. After two centuries of lies and distortion, it is hardly surprising that most people now view them with suspicion. It is our job to reinvent the human truth of the liberal revolution using words that carry new and more general conviction.

Old versions of the universal suppressed the particulars that constitute human experience. The new universal must grant that it can only be realized through those particulars. The truth of social experience is always local, but we need to extend ourselves to grasp what kind of world society we live in. Such a global society is constituted by power relations, but the bridge to an understanding of our common humanity is moral. Morality is the ability to make personal judgments about the good and bad behaviour of people, including ourselves. Anthropology ought to be a means of helping us to do that more effectively. There is no guarantee that people in the future will want to employ experts on the human condition trading under a five-syllable word of Greek origin. But if they do, I hope they will ask anthropologists to make world society personally meaningful for their students and the public.

Appendix: Terms of Association

Associate — to connect or join together; combine.
Society — the totality of social relationships linking a large group of human beings.
Societas — (Latin) a league of allies committed to mutual support in the event of an attack on one of them (sokw-yo from root sekw- to follow).
Société — (medieval French) A bounded unit with a single centre, i.e. a state.
State — society centralized as a single agency.
Territory — the land and waters under the jurisdiction of a state.
Nation — a people who share a state.
Federation — a union in which power is divided between a central authority and the constituent political units.
Corporation — a group of people combined into or acting as one body.
Community — a sense of belonging to a group; people united by a common purpose.
Social network — an open-ended, often informal set of interconnections.
Market — a social network constituted by buying and selling.
Internet — the network of networks; the system of global communications.
Civilization — the ethical, rational and cultural standards by which a great people live; the largest unit below world society.
Humanity — a collective noun for all people, past, present and future; a quality of kindness.
World — the earth with its inhabitants; universe; human society; people as a whole; all that relates to or affects the life of a person.
World society — the totality of social relationships linking the inhabitants of earth.

This was originally a lecture given in honour of Brian Morris at Goldsmtihs, University of London in 2002 and it was published as Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers No. 9, London, 2003.

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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.

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.

* * * * * * * * *

Michael Wesch , an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, well-known for his inspiring YouTube lectures and documentary shorts, has received over a hundred applications for his graduate course in ‘digital ethnography’ from around the world. The only problem: no such course exists. Wesch teaches undergraduates and has organized a ‘digital ethnography working group’ for them; and that’s it, so far. But millions have seen his creations on YouTube and people want more of it. The world is changing all around us and anthropology must try to keep up, not just because we study this world as anthropologists, but because our students live in it and they are rapidly leaving their teachers behind.

The new communications technologies are blurring the boundaries of our disciplines, transforming the content of education, spawning new genres and sites of research, demanding fresh intellectual strategies. And contemporary academic institutions act as a brake on our ability to engage with all this. Anthropology as a discipline has not yet grasped the potential of this new world. When we contemplate anthropology’s future – and indeed whether it is to have one — we need to think again about its scope, reach and impact, about the audiences we wish to address and how. This last is the main point of the story I intend to tell here. For reasons that I hope will become obvious, it is a story of my own encounters with the digital revolution as an anthropologist.

We are living through the first stages of a world revolution as profound, in my view, as the invention of agriculture. It is a machine revolution, of course: the convergence of telephones, television and computers in a digital system whose most visible symbol is the internet. It is a social revolution, the formation of a world society with means of communication adequate at last to expressing universal ideas. It is a financial revolution, the detachment of the virtual money circuit from production, linked to the West’s loss of control over the world economy. It is an existential revolution, transforming what it means to be human and how each of us relates to the rest of humanity. It is therefore also a revolution in anthropology that will make everything we have done so far seem like the prehistory of our discipline.

Oswald Spengler observes in The Decline of the West that the world historical moment you are born into does not need you; it will carry on with or without you. But still he offers a challenge to his readers “Do you have the courage to embrace it?” So too with this revolution: you can engage with it or you can hide from it. And every person’s trajectory is particular to them, even if some common outlines can be glimpsed as the revolution unfolds. Obviously, I hope that my experience will have wider resonance for our discipline; but that is for others to say. In any case I have published many programmatic tracts and lectures on my website and elsewhere.

My education was designed by James and John Stuart Mill to train recruits for the Indian civil service: Latin, Greek and algebra, with memo-writing and oral fluency thrown in. Unfortunately for me, the Indians took leave of the empire just as I was starting out. I never warmed to the typewriter. All that whiting out of mistakes was too messy for me. I depended on fierce Scottish matrons to type up my hand-written manuscripts. We both knew where the power was in this relationship and they made the most of it. So, when I was introduced to word processing in the early 80s, I seized my chance for liberation. More than that, I realised that I could become an artisan, designing my own layouts as well as the content.

Email was made in heaven for me, an oral/written hybrid, between a letter and a phone call. I still love the fluency of the medium, although internet chat is in real time. Then I discovered desk-top publishing and produced beautiful pamphlets, adding the roles of editor and publisher to my new craft identity. Next I started a mailing list, the amateur anthropological association or ‘small-triple-a’ (motto: ‘amateurs do it for love’), that flourished for a couple of years and lingered on after that. Today children grow up with mobile text messaging and Nintendo DS at hand; while the rest of us struggle to keep up with the latest innovations from Google.

Even then I realized that I had some of these initiatives the wrong way round. Desk-top publishing was alright, but the problem was distribution. How to improve on the system of putting something on a bookshop shelf in the hope that someone would find it there and have the cash to pay for it? I flirted with introducing the eighteenth century subscriber system amplified by an online data-base of interested readers; but I was already too far down the route of standard print publishing. The mailing list was dominated by a small group of friends at Cambridge; professionals and students tended to write as academic anthropologists do; so that the outsiders I wanted to attract were repelled by what they took to be a jargon-ridden clique. But Prickly Pear Pamphlets and the small-triple-a each expressed what I wanted from the medium in their own way. The point was to embrace the new technologies and to discover at first hand the opportunities they offered.

At about this time, in the mid-90s, the World Wide Web was making the internet more visual, personal and interactive. For two years I headed a Cambridge committee to explore the uses of audio-visual aids and information technology for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. People said there was no point in Cambridge University entering this brave new world; we were too old-fashioned and places like Middlesex Polytechnic had much more experience with online techniques. But I argued that over the centuries we had accumulated lots of beautiful stuff that could become a rich internet resource. In any case the digital revolution is not a linear development. Everyone enters it with their own bundle of specific advantages and drawbacks at a particular moment in time. The technology evolves, so that early users may be too adapted to older techniques, while latecomers can make more creative use of software that requires less specialist knowledge than before. The society made by the machine revolution is a river and you can never step into the same river twice.

I asked myself what I could possibly give to the young geeks who helped me keep a toehold in this revolution. I decided that it was ‘history’: I have been around since the Second World War and I have a vision of history that they don’t. I am also a teacher whose aim is not to clone myself, but rather to persuade my students to let me hitch a ride on their lives, since they are going places I could never reach by myself. I also became more self-conscious about my role as a network entrepreneur. What could I offer individuals if my enterprises had no money or prestige? They had to be given a job that they couldn’t do elsewhere. Maybe they fancied trying out graphic design: I got an amateur product, but it was free; and they acquired the experience. I had to accept that, if they no longer gained much from what they did or had more pressing things to do, they would leave. So I also worked on the value added by the collective constituted by the network; this thing had to be cool or hot or both at once! I found these methods at first through my internet-related activities, but I soon adapted them to my academic practice (teaching, running a centre etc); and the two spheres cross-fertilized each other in many ways.

As we approached the millennium, with the dot com boom roaring away, I wanted to write a book that would sum up thirty years of teaching and point forward at the same time. My first attempt was a textbook, Anthropology and the Modern Economy. But I found it depressing: it contained nothing of what I had learned as a journalist, consultant, publisher, administrator and gambler. So I withdrew the manuscript from the publisher. I couldn’t locate myself in my own book! Then I asked myself what it is about us that future generations will be interested in and remember. The answer was, obviously enough, the digital revolution. I imagined that we were like the primitive digging-stick operators whose scratching inaugurated the agricultural revolution. They hadn’t a clue that it would all end up as Chinese civilization. Nor do we know where this thing is going. But our stumbling steps into this new world will have significant consequences for those who come later. I asked what I might have to say about it and I hit on the topic of an old lecture about money that had a minor success. So I wrote The Memory Bank, a book about the implications of the digital revolution for forms of money and exchange.

This was the trigger for the next stage of my engagement with the internet, a personal website (this one). It was intended at first as a vehicle for promoting my book, but it evolved over the next decade into becoming my blog. It isn’t really a blog, even now, since most of the posts are full-length essays and my various attempts to make it more interactive never took off. It is a shop window for my writings. It feels great to bung whatever I have just written out there in a couple of minutes. And now it has quite a lot of video footage, mainly of my lectures. Without a series of devoted helpers I would be nowhere in this revolution. But I have to say that I have come on quite a long way in the last 15 years and so has the internet. I now do a lot more for myself than I once could and the software grows more user-friendly all the time.

And so to the last few years, to the social networking revolution and Web 2.0: Google, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Flock, Wave and all the rest. This is the heart of the revolution I want to join. I love Twitter for the chance to project myself as an editor of sorts, sending the best economic journalism from Europe to American traders, gold bugs and currency freaks. I meet an interesting class of anthropologists there. And I hone my subediting skills on the 140-space limit. Social bookmarking really turns me on. Classification of knowledge was hitherto done by experts and every piece of information had its unique place in a folder somewhere. Now tagging makes it possible for anyone to leave a mark on something they like or consider useful and you can find their guidance with increasingly sophisticated software. The people are generating the categories; and even a search engine like Google is becoming obsolete because its millions of hits are impersonal, less attuned to the user’s own profile.

Insertion into all this has sharpened my appreciation of the sociology involved. Twitter divides people into followers and followed. For those of us brought up on Fascism and Stalinism, all the talk of leaders and followers that animates Web 2.0 is something of a turn off. But I recall that when the Latins invented ‘society’ to describe their aspirations for collective order, the word they used had as its root sekw-, meaning to follow. If anyone was attacked, the others agreed to support them in battle. The hierarchy was temporary. Well so too on Twitter. The idea of society as a state with fixed boundaries came a lot later. The new social networks are personal and unequal; they often have a commercial feel that puts off many intellectuals. But there is something exciting going on that it would pay us to understand and use. For some time now I have studied alternative approaches to money, especially the community currency system known as LETS, and they have not yet found the right combination of social and technical principles to help them take off. I am convinced that Twitter would be an ideal platform for complementary currencies; but I will be too busy writing about it to be the organizer.

I have left the anthropology of all this implicit so far. But this year, just as a result of joining this phase of the revolution, an unanticipated chain of events led to the launch of the Open Anthropology Cooperative. A handful of friends began discussing on Twitter the possibilities for an anthropology network. The talk moved to the forum of my website for discussion at greater length. Someone suggested trying NING and I jumped in. An administrative team drawn from the launching group has supervised its explosive growth in the first few months. We already have over 2,000 members from an amazing diversity of backgrounds. They include faculty, postgraduate students, undergraduates and outsiders to the profession (genuine amateurs!). Half our 500 visitors a day come from the USA, Britain and Canada (in a ratio of 4:2:1), but the next batch make interesting reading, in order: Portugal, Germany, France, Brazil, Georgia, Italy, Greece, Australia, Switzerland, India, Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Norway, Mexico, Spain, New Zealand. We have well over a hundred discussion groups (some of them in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian and Norwegian), blogs, a forum, a wiki repository, the OAC Press (in which I take a particular interest), a seminar series and personal pages in all their multimedia variety. Anyone can start anything on the OAC and many of them do! Our members vigorously defend their independence from bureaucratic interference, but we have managed to get some minimal rules generally accepted.

People ask me how I find time for my work with all this stuff. But, since exchanging Cambridge University for a Paris chambre de bonne 12 years ago, I have doubled my rate of publication over that of the previous three decades. My productivity as a writer benefits enormously from being online 12 hours a day. I can check anything in a fraction of the time. I stay at my work station longer when I can answer an email message there, keep an eye on a football match, surf the OAC for the latest developments. Sometimes the speed and diversity of my online connections generates a wave motion that carries my writing into unexpected regions of discovery. If this is the virtual social life, it will do for me. Bring on the revolution!

We already know that fieldwork will never be the same again as a result of the digital revolution. But what can anthropologists, with our supposed expertise in social relations, do more generally to help shape the future of our institutions in this context? Our students, readers and the people we study will expect to be engaged through these new means of communication. For some this will be an uphill struggle. We must move from monologue to dialogue, from guild disciplines to the kind of lifetime self-learning that the internet affords. The universities now lag behind the students in terms of media literacy. The ‘edupunk’ movement, armed with user-friendly digital technologies, rejects the forced imposition of outdated software systems that universities have spent millions on. The latter now also face a threat to their monopolies when teachers extend their classrooms to non-university students. Anthropology has always been something of an anti-discipline, sitting uneasily with academic bureaucracy. We have a lot to gain, professionally and as human beings, from opening up to this revolution.

What have I learned from all this? I could quote from the introduction to this website: The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of goods through money are now converging in a single network of communications, the internet. We must discover how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our common task is to make a world society fit for all humanity. And anthropology is indispensable to such a project, but what will it take to join it? Michael Wesch offers some reassurance:

“Understanding human relationships within this new mediascape will require us to embrace our anthropological mainstay, participant observation. [...] Now we need to participate in the new media in order to understand the forms of sociality emerging in this quickly changing mediated world.”

But is it as straightforward as that, a whole new territory to investigate with the tried methods of fieldwork-based ethnography? By situating my personal story of engagement with the new media in a context of world revolution, I want to suggest that, while this is indeed a wonderful opportunity to join the people and reflect on the experience, anthropological understanding of what we are living through requires much more than an updated version of ethnography. The Victorians knew they were living through a revolution and so they adopted world history as their principal method. The nation-states of the 20th century encouraged a more fragmented and static perspective on the human condition. If we recognize once more that we are living in revolutionary times, we will at least have to mend the rupture between world history and ethnography that gave birth to the modern discipline. We might even turn to autobiography as a method too.

Or we could just sing along with Dai Cooper, a Canadian graduate student, who recorded herself on webcam and put ‘The Anthropology Song: a little bit of Anthropologist’ on YouTube where it soon became a viral video. ‘Maybe nobody has better explained what anthropology is all about’, enthuses Lorenz Khazaleh, whose anthropology news blog, antropologi.info, is the best around. Dai says, “I wanted to be able to express all the reasons why I love and am inspired by anthropology”. Welcome to Web 2.0 and pay attention, because the world is already there!

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Global Studio (established 2005) is a place based action research program where international students, academics and professionals come together with local universities, local government , NGOs and CBOs to collaborate with disadvantaged communities.

GS grew out of the work of the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers (2002-04) with founding partners University of Sydney, Columbia and Rome. Over the past three years (mainly) architects, planners, urban designer, landscape architects, film makers and industrial designers have worked with community groups in the Johannesburg township of Diepsloot.

The recently uploaded film, Diep Salute, profiles Diepsloot township hip hop artists, made with the aim of also promoting community development and job creation through the arts.

Thanks to Anna Rubbo.

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Anthropology in the financial crisis

Everybody knows that we are living through a hinge moment in world history generated by the financial crisis of 2008. The collapse of the credit boom has already had dramatic social consequences: the default and nationalization of banks, dramatic losses of personal savings and mortgage foreclosures on a massive scale. Where it will all end is anyone’s guess. Apart from these tangible effects, the present crisis also concerns ideas about the economy. Free market economics has gained an unparalleled dominance within the academy and society more generally in the last three decades. Economists, armed with impenetrable mathematical arguments, encouraged politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown to claim ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to their market fundamentalism. They preached an eternally benevolent spiral, ‘beyond boom and bust’, guaranteed by radically reducing the role of the state and politics in distribution – the question of who gets what in the world. The collapse of this pretence has been as sudden as the paper fortunes built on it. All too often a distinction is drawn between the world of finance and the ‘real economy’, as if borrowing money for holidays against rising house prices and the theft of public assets by corporate predators were not real. I argue for a perspective that treats money as an integral part of society rather than as something semi-detached from it (Hart 2000, 2007a).

The period since the 1980s, sometimes referred to as ‘neo-liberal globalization’, has seen two apparently contradictory trends. On the one hand, for the first time significant numbers of anthropologists have studied capitalism in its central workings; on the other, the majority have become more insular and introverted, offering fragmented narratives within a narrow framework of time and space, while leaving to others questions of where the world is heading and why. The breakdown of the economists’ intellectual hegemony represents a chance for us to link our engagement with people’s lives to anthropology’s original mission to understand humanity as a whole. We have perhaps been intimidated into adopting a more blinkered posture than is warranted by our own intellectual traditions. Bruce Kapferer (2007) has recently argued that, at its best, anthropology rests on ‘the subversion of dominance’ through an emphasis on the whole, ethnographic practice and skeptical Reason. I agree. The scale of current events reminds us that the rupture between ethnography and history that launched the modern discipline needs to be mended. Then perhaps we will build more effective bridges between the everyday circumstances that we each know well and the larger unknowns that threaten to undermine us all, thereby helping to make emergent world society more meaningful.

Money is not simply issued by governments or even by the banks: a dispersed global network of financial institutions and actors of various kinds have lately joined the process of its creation in the form of a plethora of credit instruments whose global circulation (commonly known as ‘the markets’) now vastly exceeds — or at least it did until recently — the use of money to finance international trade. For all the proliferation of issuers, this still leaves the bulk of humanity discriminated against, since access to the massive flows of global capital is limited to the few. Until recently, this question of distributive justice, indeed the politics of inequality as a whole, could be treated as secondary to the imperative of leaving ‘the markets’ free to bring about an irreversible increase in global prosperity. The current financial crisis affects rich countries first, but it has more general effects, through its consequences for investment and monetary creation in the rest of the world. Already the ‘emerging markets’ of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia are threatened with catastrophe for making their vulnerable economies depend on the house of cards that was global finance. Who wins and who loses in all this remains to be determined. It is not certain, for example, that the world’s poor will suffer most, since they have less to lose than the principal beneficiaries of the boom. But it is certain that the question of distribution will once again come to the forefront of political debate. Marx (1859) argued that, by subsuming distribution under the mechanics of exchange, liberal economists sought to disguise class exploitation as a logic of market equilibrium. The era of ‘neo-liberalism’ achieved a similar effect. Now it is obvious that market exchange has profound consequences for distribution that are far from benign and require drastic political intervention.

It seems that, along with the bankruptcy of some banks and even countries, the delegation of the power to channel credit to the private bureaucracies of contemporary finance has already lost its air of inevitability and indeed its former legitimacy. The institutions of investment banking, financial markets and professional self-regulation, with their supposedly indispensable and insuperable expertise, are now challenged on their own terms, and by the same politicians and journalists who, only a few months ago, defended them as the best or, occasionally, the least bad of all worlds. The new role of states in the crisis breaks as well with neoliberal insistence on the need to limit their influence on the distribution of money. At the same time, the global character of the crisis exposes the financial limits of each nation-state. Thus attempts by European states to act independently only show up the political weakness of their economic institutions. The US Federal Reserve has had to co-ordinate with other central banks in order to ease the access of banks to credit around the world. These phenomena reverse the economic orthodoxy concerning resource distribution that sought for three decades to release corporations from public constraints on accumulation. The challenge is both political and intellectual, in that we need to devise new global institutions and to think about them in fresh ways. After decades when inequality was justified as a necessary by-product of economic growth, the popping of the credit bubble that fostered this illusion means that the issue of distribution is certain to return to centre stage.

It is no coincidence that economic anthropology was last a powerful force in the 1970s, when the world economy was plunged into depression by the energy crisis, and has been marginalized by neo-liberal hegemony ever since. Now, if ever, is the time for anthropologists to renew an engagement with political economy that went into abeyance then. The prize at stake for our discipline as a whole is much larger than the revival of one of its parts. Anthropology’s highest mission is to start from where people are and go with them wherever they take you. That means engaging with their visions of the world, perhaps to catch a glimpse of the world humanity is making together. What better time to follow this imperative than when the model the world has been compelled to live by for three decades is in such disarray?

The making of world society

According to writers as varied as John Locke (1690) and Karl Marx (1859), ours is an age of money, a transitional phase in the history of humanity. Seen in this light, capitalism’s historical mission is to bring cheap commodities to the masses and break down the insularity of traditional communities before being replaced by a more just society. It matters where we are in this process, but the answers given differ widely. When a third of humanity works in the fields with their hands and a similar number has never made a phone call in their lives, I would say that capitalism still has quite a way to go. My focus here is on the part played by money in the formation of world society at a time when the risks of the process have just been brutally exposed. I prefer to call this ‘the new human universal’ (Hart 2008a) rather than the normal term, ‘globalization’, even though we now face the urgent question of whether world society faces another period of disintegration comparable to 1914-45 before the task of rebuilding it can again be undertaken with the seriousness that it was after 1945.

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. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century, perhaps even a federal world government, is an urgent one. Money, instead of being denigrated for its exploitive power, should be recognized for its redemptive qualities, particularly as a mediator between persons and society. Money — and the markets it sustains – is itself a human universal, with the potential to be emancipated from the social engines of inequality that it currently serves.

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 90s, I asked what it is about us that future generations will be interested in and 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 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 (Hart 2000).

My case for a recent speed-up of 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 neoliberal 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 3. the abbreviation of time and distance brought about by the communications revolution and the population’s restless mobility. The corollary of this revolution is a counter-revolution — the reassertion of state power since September 11th and the imperialist war for oil in the Middle East, to which we may now add the strong possibility of a descent via another deflation to world war. Certainly we have 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 risks for the future of life on this planet entailed in current levels and forms of economic activity might encourage more people to take globalization seriously. The ecological (‘green’) paradigm — manifested as concern for global warming and for total food, water and energy supplies – is powerful enough to replace market fundamentalism as the natural religion of this emergent world society.

The rise and fall of national capitalism

In order to understand the potential of our moment in history, we need to reflect on competing visions of the development of capitalism in the twentieth century and before. There is no more fruitful place to begin such reflection than Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece, The Great Transformation: the political and economic orgiins of our times, published in 1944 and largely gestated in England during the 1930s (Polanyi 2001). It opens with a highly selective account of the making of world society in the nineteenth century, a society that Polanyi not unreasonably considered to be lying in ruins as he wrote. Money was a central feature of all four pillars of this civilization. Polanyi identified the interest that had sustained a century of peace in Europe with what he insisted on calling haute finance,

“an institution sui generis, peculiar to the last third of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, [which] functioned as the main link between the political and economic organization of the world in this period.”(Polanyi 2001:10)

The international gold standard “was merely an attempt to extend the domestic market system to the international field”; the balance-of-power system was a superstructure built on its foundation; and the gold standard’s fall “was the proximate cause of the catastrophe”. The self-regulating market was “the fount and matrix of the system”; it had “produced unheard-of material welfare”, but it was utopian in its pursuit of an autonomous circuit of commodities and money. The liberal state, in the name of market freedom, forced all other interests in society to submit to the freedom of capital, another word for money (Ibid:3).

Later in the book, Polanyi listed money as one of the three “fictitious commodities”. Labour, land and money are essential to the industrial system; they must therefore be bought and sold, but they were definitely not produced for sale. Labour is human activity that is part of life itself; land is another word for nature; and “actual money is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance” (Ibid:72). Here Polanyi comes close to suggesting that a free market in money entails buying and selling society itself. Money and markets for him have their origin in the effort to extend society beyond its local core. Polanyi believed that money, like the sovereign states to which it was closely related, was often introduced from outside; and this was what made the institutional attempt to separate economy from politics and naturalise the market as something internal to society so subversive.

Polanyi distinguished between “token” and “commodity” forms of money. “Token money” was designed to facilitate domestic trade, “commodity money” foreign trade; but the two systems often came into conflict. Thus the gold standard sometimes exerted downward pressure on domestic prices, causing deflation that could only be alleviated by central banks expanding the money supply in various ways. The tension between the internal and external dimensions of economy often led to serious disorganization of business (Ibid: 193-4). Another way of putting this contradiction is to oppose the liberal definition of money as just a “medium of exchange” to one as a “means of payment”. Here Polanyi echoes Knapp, Keynes and others who wished to draw attention to the political possibilities for state manipulation of “purchasing power”. (I should mention in parenthesis that Polanyi’s opposition between token and commodity money was the main source for my own analysis of the interdependence of the two sides of the coin over twenty years ago, Hart 1986).

The final collapse of the international gold standard was thus one consequence of the ruinous attempt to delink commodity and token forms of money. In a trenchant discussion of the economic crisis of the 1930s that has echoes of the world economy today, Polanyi highlighted the separation of the money system from trade. As restrictions on trade grew, money became more free:

“Short-term money moved at an hour’s notice from any point of the globe to another; the modalities of international payments between governments and between private corporations or individuals were uniformly regulated….In contrast to men and goods, money was free from all hampering measures and continued to develop its capacity to transact business at any distance at any time. The more difficult it became to shift actual objects, the easier it became to transmit claims to them….The rapidly growing elasticity and catholicity of the international monetary mechanism was compensating, in a way, for the ever-contracting channels of world trade….Social dislocation was avoided with the help of credit movements; economic imbalance was righted by financial means.”(Ibid: 205-6)

But of course, in the end, political means of settling the imbalance outweighed market solutions and war was the result. I am sure that the present crisis will lead to a sharp reversal of the trend to cheapen transport costs and a more pronounced regionalization of the world economy than hitherto. I recently saw a stark aerial image of Hong Kong harbour with ships lined up as far as the eye can see. They were going nowhere because there were no bills of credit for their cargoes.

The 1940s did indeed see a world revolution; but its immediate outcome was not foreseen by Polanyi (Hart 2009a,b). Even so interest in his work has never been greater than now and this may be related to his prophetic value in the present crisis of world economy. Since the last three decades have seen a replay of the “self-regulating market” scenario and the beginning of its demise, Polanyi’s vision offers one perspective on the political and economic origins of our own times. But other visions are possible and for my own we need first to retrace our steps to the great transformation of the mid-nineteenth century.

The1860s saw a transport and communications revolution (steamships, continental railways and the telegraph) that decisively opened up the world economy (Hart 2000:146-8). At the same time a series of political revolutions gave the leading powers of the coming century the institutional means of organizing industrial capitalism. These were the American civil war, the culmination of Italy’s Risorgimento, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the formation of the Anglo-Indian super-state, Britain’s second reform act and Japan’s Meiji Restoration. German unification at the end of the decade spilled over into the 1870s through the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris commune and the formation of the French Third Republic. Karl Marx published Capital in the same decade and the First International was formed in 1864. The concentration of so many epochal events in such a short time would indicate a degree of integration of world society even then. But in the 1870s, international trade accounted for no more than 1% of GNP in most countries; and the most reliable indicator of Britain’s annual economic performance was still the weather at harvest-time (Lewis 1978).

Capitalism has always rested on an unequal contract between owners of large amounts of money and those who make and buy their products. This contract depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labour or buyers fail to pay up. The owners cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. By the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that the machine revolution was pulling unprecedented numbers of people into the cities, where they added a wholly new dimension to traditional problems of crowd control. The political revolutions of the 1860s were based on a new and explicit alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class to form states capable of managing industrial workforces and of taming the criminal gangs that had taken over large swathes of the main cities. Germany and Japan provided the clearest examples of such an alliance which took a specific form in each country.

Before long, governments provided new legal conditions for the operations of large corporations, ushering in mass production and consumption through a bureaucratic revolution. The implicit author of this new synthesis was Hegel who argued in The Philosophy of Right (1821) that states, run by university-trained bureaucrats, should regulate capitalist markets with a view to containing their extreme consequences, while allowing their material benefits to accrue to the people as a whole. I call this “national capitalism”, the attempt to control money, markets and accumulation by means of central bureaucracies. The national system became general after the First World War and was the dominant social form of twentieth-century civilization. Its apogee or “golden age” (Hobsbawm 1994) was the period 1948-1973. This was a time of strong states and economic expansion when the idea of ‘development’ (poor nations growing richer with the help of the already rich) replaced colonial empire for most ‘Third World’ countries. When, shortly before his downfall, Richard Nixon announced that “We are all Keynesians now”, he was reflecting a universal belief that governments had a responsibility to manage national capitalism in the interests of all citizens.

The 1970s were a watershed. United States expenditure on its losing war in Vietnam generated huge imbalances in the world’s money flows, leading to a breakdown of the fixed parity exchange-rate system devised at Bretton Woods during the war. America’s departure from the gold standard in 1971 triggered a free-for-all in world currency markets, leading in 1975 to the invention of money market futures in Chicago to stabilize export prices for Midwestern farmers. At the same time, the world economy was plunged into depression in 1973 by the formation of OPEC and a hefty rise in the price of oil. ‘Stagflation’ (high unemployment and inflation) increased, opening the way for conservatives such as Reagan and Thatcher to revive the strategy of giving economic priority to ‘the market’ rather than ‘the state’. The economic conditions of three decades ago and the policies devised then find their denouement today.

In 1975, all but a minute proportion of the money exchanged internationally paid for goods and services purchased abroad. Thirty years later, this function in turn accounted for only a small fraction of global money transfers, the vast bulk being devoted to exchanging money for money in another form. This rising tide of money, sometimes known as ‘the markets’, represents the apotheosis of financial capitalism, with the actual production and sale of commodities and political management of currencies and trade virtually abandoned in favour of an autonomous global circuit of capital. The conditions Polanyi described for the decades leading up to the First World War have been closely replicated in the last quarter-century. As the smoke rises from the rubble of neoliberalism’s demise, we should revisit the story of national capitalism’s rise and fall; and Polanyi’s account of that earlier cycle has lost none of its fascination for us.

Money, much as Durkheim (1912) argued for religion, is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal (Hart 2007a). Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas it is a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead. Money, as a token of society, 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. This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is highly variable. 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 between production outside and consumption at home 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.

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, as most sociologists and anthropologists of money do, 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. Perhaps this was what Simmel (1900) had in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

The two great means of communication are language and money (Hart 2000). Anthropologists have paid much attention to the first, which divides us more than it brings us together, but not to money whose potential for universal communication is more reliable, in addition to its well-advertised ability to symbolize and even generate differences between us. We cannot afford to neglect money’s potential for universal connection, choosing rather to demonize it as the source of our vulnerability to those who have a lot more of it. It is high time for us to return to a more inclusive philosophical tradition of anthropology, building on Kant’s example, but also on the neo-Kantianism of Durkheim, Mauss and Simmel in the early twentieth century . I have been driven to this conclusion by studying money as the most tangible manifestation of the new human universal that is our shared occupation of the planet.

Mauss and Polanyi

Do anthropologists have something to say about all this? It would help if we could bring the distributive consequences of finance down to a concrete level. Our readers might then be able to engage with money not as a superhuman force with devastating effects, but as the outcome of ideas and institutions that can and should be changed by human action. Kula objects (Malinowski 1922) have magical power for those who exchange them, but anthropologists have shown their social logic and instrumentality. We have always invented concepts to describe and explain social processes quite different from those familiar at home. The current crisis presents us with a compelling reason to do so again, this time in a global context. When others may be losing their heads, there are rich precedents in the anthropological literature for where to start.

We can do no better than to renew our engagement with the writings of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi. The ideas of these foundational writers in economic anthropology have been sliced and diced – like mortgage debt – to serve different purposes over the years, but their perspectives on political economy can help us to make sense of the current situation and to recommend a path forward beyond market fundamentalism. Mauss’s reflections on money and exchange in The Gift (1925) have often been misunderstood. Probably his essay’s title and later academic discourse have obscured his concern there to use unconventional money forms to illuminate some potentially dangerous aspects of money forms based on capitalist corporations and the welfare state. Mauss was a cooperative socialist in the British tradition of the Rochdale Pioneers, Keir Hardie and the Webbs. He was a tremendous Anglophile and spent the war on the front line as a translator for British and Australian troops. He also kept a close eye on the cooperative movement in Switzerland and Germany. He lost part of his inheritance financing a cooperative bakery in Paris. But his metier was as a political journalist. His political writings (Mauss 1997) run to 700 pages, about two-thirds of them written in 1920-25, the period when he wrote The Gift. He was anti-capitalist, but not anti-market. He was pleased that his uncle’s idea of an organic division of labour was extended to international economy after the war.

He also tried his hand at financial journalism, notably in the context of the exchange rate crisis of 1922-4. In an unpublished paper, “Second general conclusion. A means of overhauling society: the manipulation of currencies” (Fournier 2006: 212 and 390 n.105), Mauss claims, following his friend François Simiand, that the great economic revolutions are “monetary in nature” and that the manipulation of currencies and credit could be a “method of social revolution…without pain or suffering”. He wished to give an economic content to juridical socialism. “It suffices to create new monetary methods within the firmest, the narrowest bounds of prudence. It will then suffice to manage them with the most cautious rules of economics to make them bear fruit among the new entitled beneficiaries. And that is revolution. In this way the common people of different nations would be allowed to know how they can have control over themselves—without the use of words, formulas or myths” (Populaire, 6th May 1924).

In analyzing practices such as the kula ring or potlatch, Mauss pointed to how monetary means were a crucial constituent of the social order. The social distinctions allocating rights to engage in different exchange institutions organized the monetary media and were organized by them in turn. Malinowski (1922) showed that not everyone had the right to engage in the kula ring; and this had particular implications for social rules and hierarchies. The imagined ‘force’ of the monetary ‘objects’ also defined the multiple but limited possibilities of the participants. If the ‘gift’ implied disinterest, it was in fact a site of sometimes violent power struggles. These helped to define, reproduce or transform the social order and even the boundaries of particular groups. Mauss observed, on the basis of these reflections, that in contemporary capitalism the wealthy classes acted increasingly as if they did not belong to a social order that made redistributive obligation a condition of their hierarchical privilege. Their amnesia when it came to the ‘gift’ was not just a function of power, but of an accumulation of power that considered itself to be socially unbounded. As a result, heightened strife put the social order itself at risk.

Although Polanyi’s analysis of how markets became disembedded from the rest of society, in The Great Transformation and after, is often thought of as a general critique of market relations, like Mauss he considered markets and money to be fundamental elements of any social order (Hann and Hart 2009). He too contended that the classes who benefited from markets, particularly high finance in the decades before the First World War, neglected the interests of the rest of the population, with devastating consequences for society. The distribution of resources, according to him, should not be left to the search for profit in market relations, but needed also to acknowledge solidarity between all members of society. Like Mauss, Polanyi was concerned with the ideas that defined money, the rules of its use and the social distinctions that made its circulation possible and legitimate. Above all, he identified the historical dialectic or ‘double movement’ whereby the drive of capitalists to escape from social constraints met the countervailing power of classes and institutions (such as those adhering to the welfare state) acting in society’s self-defense. Polanyi analyzed the specific effects of shifts in the distribution of resources, showing how this was the object of violent power struggles culminating in untold human misery and the protracted death of a civilization. Anthropologists following him would thus explore how the social struggles over money are understood by the participants, and with what consequences for distribution itself. This would offer a critique of the pretense that economics is not social or political; beyond that, it would constitute a research programme.

The two authors could be said to be complementary. Mauss reminds us that monetary relations may be understood by analysing how the objects of exchange and the social roles of the participants are defined. This process is not restricted to the political utopias of liberalism. As much as the kula was a particular way to understand political economy in the Western Pacific, the ‘rationality’ of homo economicus is just another version of this, not simply a human universal to be accepted without reflection. Polanyi drew attention to how economic institutions organize and are in turn organized by a plurality of distribution mechanisms that, in the modern world, affect the lives of millions of people who participate in them, without being granted any measure of control. This led him to highlight the inequality created by these institutions, as they swing between the poles of market and state, of society’s external and internal relations. In the current crisis, the immediate reaction is to turn to a variety of government institutions with Keynesian redistribution in mind, flipping the coin from tails to heads as it were, instead of insisting that states and the markets have to work together in less one-sided ways than before. To this end, Polanyi’s call for a return to social solidarity, drawing especially on the voluntary reciprocity of associations, reminds us that people in general must be mobilized to contribute their energies to the renewal of society. It is not enough to rely on impersonal states and markets.

Polanyi and Mauss made sure that their more abstract understandings of political economy were grounded in the everyday lives of concrete people, thereby lending to field research the power of general ideas. I have already noted a recent increase in anthropological research on aspects of capitalism, but anthropologists have largely left the global effects of an unequal distribution of money, the class conflict between rich and poor everywhere, to other branches of the academic division of labour, especially to economists of whatever political persuasion. There are rich precedents for the anthropological study of distribution in particular contexts, but we still tend to privilege the rural inhabitants of the former colonial empires and settle for cultural representations of isolated social fragments.

The missing link between the everyday and the world at large can be found in the work of Polanyi and Mauss. An unblinking focus on distribution at every level from the global to the local reveals how the social consequences of political economy and the way it is understood by those who make it are one and the same social process. The current crisis renders this insight particularly visible, since it challenges contemporary financial ideas, while its tangible distributive effects are felt and feared throughout the world. We are clearly witnessing a power struggle of potentially awesome consequences. Each new political response to the latest economic calamity evokes the spectre of the Great Depression and its bloody aftermath. The mask of neo-liberal ideology has been ripped from the politics of world economy.

Money in the making of world society

What light do Mauss and Polanyi throw on the part played by markets and money in the making of world society? 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. The pure types of selfish and generous economic action obscure the complex interplay between our individuality and belonging in subtle ways to others. He was highly critical of the Bolsheviks’ destruction of confidence in the expanded sense of sociability that sustained the market economy (Mauss 1997). In his view, markets and money were human universals whose principal function was the extension of society beyond the local sphere, even if they did not always take the impersonal form we are familiar with. This was why, in a long footnote to The Gift (Mauss 1990:100-102), he disputed Malinowski’s (1921) assertion that kula valuables could not be considered to be money. Mauss advocated an ‘economic movement from below’, in the form of syndicalism, co-operation and mutual insurance. The true significance for him of finding elements of the archaic gift in contemporary capitalism was to refute the revolutionary eschatology of both right and left. Most of the possibilities for a human economy already co-exist in our world; so the task is to build new combinations with a different emphasis, not to repudiate a caricature of the market in the name of a radical alternative. Here Mauss follows Hegel — rather than Aristotle or Marx — in seeking the integration of institutional possibilities that have been variously dominant in history rather than representing them as mutually exclusive historical stages.

Mauss was interested in how we make society where it didn’t exist before. Hence we offer gifts on first dates or on diplomatic missions to foreign powers. How do we push the limits of society outwards? For him money and markets were intrinsic to this process. Hence giving personalized valuables could be considered to be an exchange of money objects if we operate with a broader definition than one based on impersonal currencies and focus rather on the function of their transfer, the extension of society beyond the local level. This helps to explain his claim that the great economic revolutions are monetary in nature, meaning that they push us into unknown reaches of society and require new money forms and practices to bridge the gap. The combination of neoliberal globalization and the digital revolution has led to a rapid expansion of money, markets and telecommunications, all reinforcing each other in a process that has extended society beyond its national form, making it much more unequal and unstable in the process.

All economic possibilities coexist now, including those that have been variously dominant in history. Our task is to build economic solidarity (économie solidaire, Laville and Cattani 2006) through new institutional combinations and with a new emphasis. This is a concept that animates much progressive intervention in Brazil and France, as well as a new collection produced by the US Social Forum (Allard et al 2008). It means combining the equal reciprocity of freely self-organized groups with the redistributive powers of the state. It is, however, no longer obvious, as it was for Mauss, Polanyi and Keynes, where the public levers of democratic power are to be located, since the global explosion of money, markets and telecommunications over the last three decades has severely exposed the limitations of national frameworks of economic management. We are clearly witnessing the start of another long swing in the balance between state and market. Before long, a genuine revival of Keynesian redistributive politics seems to be inevitable. But the imbalances of the money system are now global, as the financial rescue operation recently performed on failing American banks by the ‘sovereign funds’ of some Asian and Middle Eastern governments shows. Society is already taking the form of large regional trading blocs like the EU, NAFTA, ASEAN and Mercosul; and the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF, WTO) promote no interest beyond that of western capital. The strength of any push to reform global institutions will depend on the severity of the current economic crisis. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s is bound to fail.

Conclusions: Polanyi’s prophecy then and now

So what are the lessons to be drawn from comparing our situation with the one Polanyi depicted before? He explained the world crisis then as the outcome of a previous round of what many today would call “globalization”. There are substantial parallels between the last three decades and a similar period before 1914. In both cases, market forces were unleashed within national societies, leading to rapid capital accumulation and an intensification of economic inequality. Finance capital led the internationalization of economic relations and people migrated in large numbers all over the world. Money seemed to be the dominant social force in human affairs; and this could be attributed to its greater freedom of movement as the boundaries of society were extended outwards, then by colonial empire, now by the digital revolution and transnational corporations. The main difference is that the late nineteenth century saw the centralization of politics and production in a bureaucratic revolution, while a century later these same bureaucracies were being dismantled by neoliberal globalization. Moreover, the immediate winner of ‘the second thirty years war’ (1914-1945) was a strengthened national capitalism whose synthesis of state and market was hardly anticipated by Polanyi.

It is odd that Polanyi (1944) appears sometimes to reduce the structures of national capitalism to an apolitical ’self-regulating market’. For his analysis of money, markets and the liberal state was intensely political, as was his preference for social planning over the market. His war-time polemic, reproducing something of his opponents’ abstractions, was more a critique of liberal economics than a realistic account of actually existing capitalism. This would explain the lingering confusion over whether he thought a ‘disembedded’ market was possible or just a figment of liberal ideology, ‘market fundamentalism’. Similarly, one could argue either that neoliberalism did effectively disembed the market economy or that its claim to have done so was a mystification of the fact that markets were still embedded in largely invisible political processes. In either case, the postwar turn to ‘embedded liberalism’ (Harvey 2005) or social democracy — what I have called the apogee of national capitalism — is only weakly illuminated by The Great Transformation.

I have made much here of Mauss’s idea that the principal function of money and markets is to extend society beyond its present limits. Thus Malinowski’s ethnography of the kula ring could be taken as a metaphor for the world economy of his day, with island economies that were not self-sufficient being drawn into trade with each other by means of personalized exchange of valuables between local leaders. These canoe expeditions were dangerous and magical because their crews were temporarily outside the realm of normal society. This always happens when society’s frontiers are pushed rapidly outwards, as they have time and time again in the last two centuries and long before that. The period of ‘neoliberal financialization’ could be compared with previous episodes in the history of global capitalism, such as the dash to build continental railroads, the gold strikes in California, Alaska and South Africa or the wild rubber boom of the mid- to late nineteenth century. There are many analogous episodes to be found in the mercantilist economies that emerged during the period 1500-1800, notoriously the ‘South Sea bubble’ and the ‘Tulips craze’. Similarly, the last three decades saw a rapid extension of society’s frontiers after the postwar convergence of state and market in national capitalism reached its limit in the 1970s. The quick wealth and cowboy entrepreneurship we have just witnessed was made possible by the absence of regulation in a period of global economic expansion. The end of the bubble marks an opportunity to consider how world markets might now be organized in the general interest.

It is easy enough to harp on the irrational excess and sheer inequality of the neoliberal era — the heedless speculation, corporate skullduggery, outrageous looting of public assets, not-so-creative destruction of nature and society. But there are lasting institutional effects, just as there were to previous booms which generated transport and communication systems; a mildly inflationary gold standard; new industrial uses for rubber; stock markets and colonial empires. I have suggested here that the extension of society to a more inclusive level has positive features; and, before we demonize money and markets, we should try to turn them to institutional ends that benefit us all. The world economy is more integrated than it was even two decades ago; we need new principles of political association with which to put in place more effective regulatory frameworks. Fragmentation would be a disaster. Clearly the political questions facing humanity today concern distributive justice. The long period of Western dominance of the world economy is coming to an end. New actors on the world stage will have their say about who gets what. An escalation of war and general fractiousness is quite likely. Under these circumstances, a focus on the socially redemptive qualities of money and markets might be quite salutary. In this constructive sense, I depart from Polanyi’s conclusions; but I fear that his time as a prophet is yet to come (Hart 2008c).

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