Category: World
Edited transcription of an improvised talk for a seminar, “Social movements and the solidarity economy”, organized by Jean-Louis Laville and Geoffrey Pleyers, EHESS, Paris, 2 February 2012. I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on […]
The first Goody lecture given at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany on 1st June 2011. The lecture is available from the Institute in a handsome print version. I am grateful to Chris Hann for the chance to reflect here on the debt I owe to my teacher. Part One Jack Goody’s […]
Saul Wainwright commented on the previous post in this series, CLR James and the idea of an African revolution: “I have been wondering about how to tie the Egyptian revolution into the larger world system. I was not aware that CLR thought there would be two more revolutions, one being Russian and other being American. […]
Today’s Financial Times has a global economic analysis of considerable historical vision by Martin Wolf. He takes his key terms from Ken Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000). Pomeranz argued that a major gap between China and the West opened up in the late 18th century. […]
Sunam Son from Chicago wrote to me through the contact form to ask what I meant by my occasional references to a possible World War III. I wrote this in reply. 1. The economic crisis has provoked historical comparisons with the 1930s, but I consider another analogy might be when three decades of financial imperialism […]
Is an anthropology of the internet possible? If so, what would it look like? I will attempt a provisional answer here, building on my book about the consequences of the digital revolution for the forms of money and exchange. People, machines and money matter in this world, in that order. Most intellectuals know very little […]
Introduction 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 […]
Mohandas K. Gandhi’s critique of the modern identification of society with the state was devastating. He believed that it disabled citizens, subjecting mind and body to the control of professional experts when the purpose of a civilization should be to enhance its members’ sense of their own self-reliance. He proposed instead that every human being […]
Now published here by Storicamente as “The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature”: Mauss, Polanyi and the breakdown of the neoliberal world economy. 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 […]
The development of capitalism No-one can deny that the human presence on our planet has undergone remarkable development in the last two centuries. In 1800 the world’s population was around one billion. It had grown slowly over the previous 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture. Cipolla (1968) estimates that births regularly exceeded deaths by […]
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.
