A New Commonwealth — Ver 5.0
I am a fully paid-up member of the Karl Polanyi fan club. In the past few years I have published, with my collaborators, a collection of essays on the significance of The Great Transformation for understanding our times (Blanc 2011, Holmes 2012) and have made him a canonical figure for my versions of economic anthropology, […] →Read more
December 2012 This interview is part of an ongoing series about open access (OA), publishing, communication, and anthropology. The first interview in this series was with Jason Baird Jackson. The second interview was with Tom Boellstorff. The third installment of this OA series is with Keith Hart. Part 1 Ryan Anderson: Thanks for doing this […] →Read more
“The informalization of the world economy”, keynote lecture for the 24th Conference of the Societa’ Italiana di Economia Pubblica: “Informal economy, tax evasion and corruption”, Pavia, 24-25 September 2012 A la recherche du temps perdu The idea of an informal economy was born at the moment when the post-war era of developmental states was drawing […] →Read more
A review of David Graeber Debt: The first 5,000 years (Melville House, New York, 2011, 534 pages) Debt is everywhere today. What is “sovereign debt” and why must Greece pay up, but not the United States? Who decides that the national debt will be repaid through austerity programmes rather than job-creation schemes? Why do the […] →Read more
Europe in the global economic crisis I have been writing about the euro for a decade (Hart 2002, 2007a, 2012), always from a critical perspective, since I have long believed that a single currency cannot address the needs of a large and diverse region. Moreover, the European Union’s ambition to transcend national capitalism by becoming […] →Read more
This essay was written in August 2008 for a book that subsequently folded. The timing is important, the month of my retirement from the British academy (but not from university life), a month before the financial crash. I discovered it in my folders just recently and find it to be one of the better expressions […] →Read more
A response to John McCreery’s OAC blog post, Theory and method in anthropology: an historical speculation: Thanks for reposting this, John. I don’t expect us to agree on this one, but, despite or because of my training in British social anthropology, I take a rather different view of the epistemological problem. The attempt to separate […] →Read more
The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2011-2012 identifies twelve “pillars” of sustainable national competitiveness: institutions; infrastructure; macroeconomic environment; health and primary education; higher education and training; goods market efficiency; labour market efficiency; financial market development; technological readiness; market size; business sophistication; and innovation. 142 countries are then ranked according to relevant variables in a […] →Read more
This is a more polished and hopefully accessible version of the essay below. Go to openDemocracy for the link here. →Read more
The global economic crisis is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. Events since 2008 should be seen as the […] →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.
