A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
The Haitian disaster has boosted Naomi Klein’s theory of ‘disaster capitalism‘. In an article entitled Disaster capitalism headed for Haiti, Stephen Lendman provides a summary of Klein’s argument and a trenchant account of recent events in Haiti as a powerful reinforcement of her central thesis, featuring American imperialism at its worst. “Neoliberalism dominates the world […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
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 […] →Read more
Edited extracts from a recorded conversation between Keith Hart and Bill Maurer Marina Del Rey, August 2007 KH: There are quite profound similarities and differences between us. My version of the dialectic is that, if we want the quite significant differences to remain under control, we have to establish a framework of sameness to start […] →Read more
These posts to the ASA Globalog in November 2009 were part of a series about anthropologists’ contributions to understanding the financial crisis. 1. “In the long run we’re all dead” (Keynes) 2. “The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature” (Mauss) 3. The limits of naivety for the anthropology of money 4. Surfing the credit […] →Read more
What follows is a transcript of a lecture I gave to a conference, ‘Anthropology and psychology: the legacy of the Torres Strait expedition, 1898-1998’, which was held in St. John’s College, Cambridge, 10-12 August 1998. It was published online by Science as Culture and may still be found there. I have chosen to revive it […] →Read more
This short article was published in 2002 by the Geneva-based journal, Finance and the Common Good, soon after the euro was launched as a physical currency. Its main argument was that the euro is a national monopoly currency extended to a larger territory which could not possibly meet the economic needs of so diverse a […] →Read more
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.
