Category: Human economy
Over on nettime-l, a list for those who once thought “tactical media” was the way forward, the old question of men and machines has been revived with due acknowledgment to Marshall McLuhan. One contributor exclaimed that “of course the machines won” and another said this was “simplistic Luddite rubbish”. This was my response. I can’t […]
A workshop on The Human Economy was held at Goldmiths London on the afternoon of 26th January 2011. It involved all three editors and several contibuting authors and was organized by Professor Catherine Alexander, who is one of them. The editors each spoke about their own involvement in the international project and their vision for […]
Podcast of a lecture and discussion at LSE on 27th January 2011.
The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani Editors, to be published soon by Polity, Cambridge) is the first expression in English of a project that began a decade ago at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Much of this theoretical and practical work is unknown in […]
The changing character of money Of all the institutions we live by, the most pervasive is money (see the book that this website is named after). Its power to affect our lives is often disturbing, yet most of us take its form for granted. Here I address what looks on the face of it like […]
Our moment in history Magellan’s crew completed the first circumnavigation of the planet some thirty years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic. At much the same time, Bartolomé de las Casas opposed the racial inequality of Spain’s American empire in the name of human unity. We are living through another ‘Magellan moment’. In the second half […]
Has been published in a new open source journal created by the Association of Social Anthropologists, ASAOnline. See the original keynote lecture of the Rethinking Economic Anthropology conference held at the LSE on 11th and 12th of January 2008 here as streaming video. World society has been formed as a single interactive network in our […]
I want to start with Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch. 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 […]
A bureaucratic revolution in the late 19th century led to capitalism being organised by states and large corporations. This stage of 'state capitalism' is still with us and it involves the attempt to manage markets and accumulation through national bureaucracies. Its antithesis was called socialism, but after our experience in the 20th century, it may […]
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
