A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
After the Paris attacks. A letter to my daughter, Lou Hart. Sophie and Constance are shaken, S more moved by all the calls from kin and friends, poring over images of the carnage, but also thinking of what it means to be gunned down in a bar, asking why people would throw down blankets to […] →Read more
(Delivered on October 22nd in the Economics Faculty, Humboldt University, Berlin as the Hermann Otto Hirschfeld lecture for 2015. With profound thanks to Prof. Rolf Schieder for his role in organizing this event.) Religion belongs to a set of terms that also includes art and science. Science began as a form of knowledge opposed to […] →Read more
http://interventionseconomiques.revues.org/304 Résumés Français English Interest in the work of Karl Polanyi has increased with the coming of neoliberal globalization and it may still increase given the catastrophies that followed. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl Polanyi explained the difficulties encountered by capitalism between the two wars. They resulted in part from the tendency […] →Read more
Ryan Anderson: Earlier you referred to OA as “a strategy of resistance to privatization of the commons”. Can you elaborate on that point? Keith Hart: I meant that private property is still the great unresolved contradiction of modern society, not least because its ubiquity often makes society invisible. For Rousseau, the invention of private property […] →Read more
What would happen if anthropologists, for some limited purposes, abolished the division between academic writing and journalism that Mauss himself observed and that has prevented us from grasping how they fed into each other at a key moment in his life? The dominant presence before the war of his uncle, Émile Durkheim, obviously contributed to […] →Read more
In the late 90s I met the US ambassador in Paris. He asked what Tony Blair was going to do with the pound/euro issue. I said the question should rather be which of Blair’s subjects he could bring along to take part in any currency deal. By that I meant that the United Kingdom, formed […] →Read more
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA THE HUMAN ECONOMY RESEARCH PROGRAMME POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS – CALL FOR APPLICATIONS The University of Pretoria’s Human Economy Research Programme has funding for six postdoctoral fellows to undertake research on topics relevant to the following themes · Money in the Making of World Society · Building a Human Economy in southern and central […] →Read more
Presentation at the World Bank PSD Forum 2006, Washington DC, April 4-6 Bureaucratic form and informality Most people attending this Forum live substantially inside what we may call the formal economy. This is a world of salaries or fees paid on time, regular mortgage payments, clean credit ratings, fear of the tax authorities, regular meals, […] →Read more
LETS and ‘open money’ The late twentieth century saw a revival of self-organized credit money, 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 […] →Read more
South Africa recently celebrated twenty years of “democracy” since a Black majority government was formed by the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies in 1994. South Africa has been a central, not a peripheral player in world society for 150 years. Its inhabitants have long been engaged in the struggle for democracy and equality. […] →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.
