History, Economics, and Anthropology: The Work of Karl Polanyi

Historians in their consideration of theory have to concern themselves not only with “theories of history,” but also with the theory of the other social sciences. Social scientists perhaps hope that one day they may be able to announce that dum Romae consulitur, Saguntum expugnatum est. This article is in the nature of a “report from Saguntum.”

Economics, being the most “scientific” of the social sciences, the most ready to formulate laws, is particularly apt to provoke conflict. The present debate over the “new economic history,” with its emphasis on the use of models and of econometric techniques, is an example. Those who accuse “Cliometrics” of dehumanizing history are in fact asking whether economic laws are valid for all periods and types of society. The new economic historians claim, with some justice, that they have not introduced economic laws and methods of inference into history, but only questioned some hypotheses which already implicitly relied on them. But their methods in any case have brought into prominence the question of the range of the deductions from economic theory possible at any point in time, and the question whether economic theory becomes less valid as we move further from the modern economy. [1]

* The following abbreviations are used in the notes:

GT - Karl Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (London, 1945, with some additions to the 1st ed., The Great Transformation, New York, 1944).

TM - Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, ed. K. Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Ill., 1957).

DST - Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy, K. Polanyi in collaboration with Abraham Rotstein (Seattle, Wash., 1966).

TPE - Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology, ed. George Dalton (New York, 1967).

Essays - Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. George Dalton (Garden City, N.Y., 1968).

1. M. Desai, “Some Issues in Econometric History,” Economic History Review ser. [2, 21(1968), 1-16 (with earlier bibliography); A. Gershenkron, “The Discipline and I,” Journal of Economic History 27 (1967), 443-459; A. H. Conrad et al., “Slavery as an Obstacle to Economic Growth in the United States: A Panel Discussion,” ibid., 518-560;Pierre Vilar, “Pour une meilleure compréhension entre économistes et historiens,” Revueh istorique 233 (1965), 293-312.]

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Historians of economic development are disturbed not only by the prospect of having their theories falsified or their problems solved by economists, but also by invitations to take up the ancient position of the historian as a practical adviser. Here their position comes particularly close to that of the economic anthropologist. [2] Anthropologists are increasingly involved in the study of economic development and social change, and this has produced both murmurs of conflict between “pure” and “applied” anthropology, and a heated debate on the relevance of modern economic theory for the analysis of primitive or peasant economies. This debate would in any case be of interest to historians, but it is particularly relevant because it arose out of the work of an economic historian, Karl Polanyi, who was concerned with past civilizations even more than with primitive existing societies.

Polanyi’s thesis, briefly stated, was that economic theory applies only to the modern market economy and cannot serve the needs of the economic anthropologist or the historian of pre-market civilizations. Nineteenth-century Europe “disembedded” the economy from the social structure, freed economic motives from social control and set in motion a process by which economic considerations came to dominate society. “Once the economic system is organized in separate institutions, based on specific motives and conferring a special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws” (GT 63-64). To understand earlier or less developed societies, in which economic relations are still “embedded” in the social system (or in Mauss’s terminology, economic transactions cannot be separated from the “faits sociaux totaux” in which they are incorporated) [3] we need a new theory of comparative economics. In non-market societies the economy cannot be distinguished by reference to an interrelated flow of rational calculations. Instead, the historian or anthropologist must start from the material objects which serve to satisfy wants, and follow their movements

2. A. Gershenkron, op. cit.; Carter Goodrich, “Economic History: One Field or Two?” in Journal of Economic History 20 (1960), 531-538; Lucy Mair, Studies in Applied Anthropology (London, 1957), esp. 9-22, “Applied Anthropology and Development Policies” (1956).

3. TM, 68, 71; M. Mauss, “Essai sur le Don,” L’Année sociologique sér 2, 1 (1923-24) (reprinted in Mauss, Anthropologie et sociobogie [3e, augm, éd. Paris, 1966], 143-279; English translation, The Gift [London, 1954]). Talcott Parsons’ “structural differentiation” (cf. Parsons, The Social System [Glencoe, Ill., 1951], ch. 4-5; Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution [Chicago, 1959]) is a much more precise and useful formulation of what Polanyi calls “disembedding.”

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to see what operational patterns and groupings emerge. [4] Four such patterns are suggested by Polanyi: reciprocity, or “movements between correlative points of symmetrical groupings in society”; redistribution, or “movements towards an allocative center and out of it again”; exchange, or “vice-versa movements... under a market system”; and householding, the pattern of peasant subsistence agriculture. [5]

Although the essence of these views had been presented by Polanyi in 1944 in The Great Transformation, they did not reach anthropologists and ancient historians until the late 1950’s, when the collective volume Trade and Market in the Early Empires was published and other researches inspired or influenced by Polanyi began to appear. By this time Polanyi was seventy and neither his disciples nor his critics have made much attempt to enquire into the background of his thought or the formative influences of his youth. The result has sometimes been that what was original in his thought has been underrated, while what was part of a common culture has been separated from its context and taken for perversity.

1. 1886-1933: Hungary and Austria

Economic anthropologists would do well to remember that Polanyi was born only two years after Malinowski. He grew up in the radical bourgeois society of Budapest - an intellectual Jewish community cut off from political power, but expecting change. Universal suffrage had been introduced in Austria in 1907, and the political and economic dominance of the Magyar landowning aristocracy was seen as an anachronism which could not last. Preparation for the new order took the form of theoretical discussion rather than political action. [6] Formal education was provided by the Law faculty in the universi-

4. TM, 241-242, 248-250. his does not mean that only activities concerned with the supply of material means are included in the economy.

5. For householding cf. GT, 60, DST, ch. 5, “Householding: Land and Religion”; for other definitions TM, 250. use the term “market exchange” instead of Polanyi’s “exchange” to avoid ambiguity, since reciprocal gift-giving may also be regarded as a form of exchange.

6. Cf. R. Seton Watson, Corruption and Reform in Hungary: A Study of Electoral Practice (London, 1911); Leo Valiani, La Dissoluzione dell’Austria Ungheria (Milan, 1966); Paul Ignotus, “The Hungary of Michael Polanyi,” in The Logic of Personal Knowledge, Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi on His 70th Birthday... (London, 1961), 3-12. I am not here attempting a biography of Karl Polanyi; some further details of his background may be found in the obituary articles by his daughter Kari Levitt, Co-Existence 1 (1964), 113-121, and by G. Dalton and P. Bohannan, American Anthropologist 67 (1965), 1508-1511, and in Hans Zeisel, “Karl Polanyi,” International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (1968) XII, 172-174. Cf. also Ilona Duczytiska [Polanyi], “The Hungarian Populists,” introduction to The Plough and the Pen: Writings from Hungary 1930-1956, ed. I. Duczyitiska and K. Polanyi (London, 1963), and the account [of Polanyi’s activities as a leading member of the Galilei Circle in Márta Tomory, Uj vizeken járók. A Galilei Kör története (Budapest, 1960). I should like to thank Dr. L. Peter for telling me of this book and Dr. M. Boskovits for translating parts of it for me.]

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ties, which included political economy and constitutional history in its syllabus, while outside the curriculum Marxism and sociology were major interests. [7] Karl Mannheim (who came from the same background as Polanyi), discussing the influence of Marxism on German sociology in this period, has made some observations which seem relevant to the position of sociology as well as Marxism as non-academic subjects in Hungary. “Marxian theory, like many other social theories, counted only as an ‘opposition theory,’ i.e., academicians did not concern themselves with this branch of knowledge. This had the advantage that many urgent problems of everyday life and of political tensions were given a sociological interpretation in this non-academic discipline; but it had the disadvantage that those theories were abused for propaganda purposes, and, since they were handled by laymen, an element of dilettantism inevitably crept into them.” [8]

Interest in sociology was not solely inspired by Marxism. The economic “take-off” which Marx had observed in England came later on the Continent, and thus problems of economic growth, in which the social consequences of industrialization predominated in Germany and the existence of large “underdeveloped” agricultural areas in Eastern Europe, gave sociology at this time a position not unlike that of anthropology in the general culture of the intelligentsia in America, France, and England today. As the current interest in anthropology reflects Western society’s attempt to come to a new understanding with Africa and Asia, so sociology (with psychology) served as a focus and common ground of discussion for those who struggled to understand the crisis of European society between the two world wars. “It is precisely in the field of sociology that the spiritual and cultural forces of post-war Germany sought to shape themselves” (Mannheim, op. cit.).

Sociologists’ interest in Marxian theory had initially been concerned with the validity of the materialist analysis of capitalism, with the empirical study of social classes, and with the development from the theory of classes of the sociology of knowledge. [9] But the development of world-wide economic crisis

7. For the Law syllabus see Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1930) I, 269-273 (“The Social Sciences as Disciplines: Hungary”; written under the Horthy regime and almost completely ignoring the previous unofficial left-wing sociology.) Howard Becker and Harry E. Barnes, Social Thought from Lore to Science (Boston, 1938) II, 1078-108 1; G. Lukács, “Meine Weg zu Marx,” Georg Lukdcs zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1955), 225-231, and the account of Sorokin’s university years in Russia in his autobiography, A Long Journey (New Haven, 1963).

8. Karl Mannheim, “German Sociology (1918-1933),” Politica 1 (1934), 12-33.

9. I know no comprehensive study of the influence of Marx and Marxism in sociology, but cf. Talcott Parsons, “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and [Weber,” Journal of Political Economy 36 (1928), 641-661, 37 (1929), 31-51; Franz Adler, “Marxist Philosophy and Sociology of Knowledge,” Modern Sociological Theory in Continuity and Change, ed. Howard Becker and Alvin Boskoff (New York, 1957), 399 ff.; H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York, 1958).]

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and the example of a new type of economy in Russia led to increased interest in Marx’s analysis of the weaknesses of the capitalist system, and in the possibility of a socialist alternative. It was this which was to be the mainspring of Polanyi’s work on comparative economics. He contributed an article on socialist accounting to the Archiv für Sozialwissenscha ten in 1922, [10] in which he already voiced his belief in the social and moral superiority of the centrally planned socialist economy, guided by “social demand” rather than by the demands of individual consumers. From 1924 to 1933 he worked for the Viennese weekly Osterreichische Volkswirt as a leader-writer and commentator on international (especially English) politics and finance. The effect of these years of closely following the spread of economic crisis and the rise of Fascism can clearly be seen in The Great Transformation. But that his economic interests were combined with a more general interest in sociology, important for his later development, can be seen in pieces such as “Lancashire als Menschheitsfrage,” an analysis of the social and economic reasons for the superior efficiency of Japanese cotton production; “Wirtschaft v. Demokratie,” [12] a discussion of the growing tendency for the political choice between right and left to be seen in economic terms; or “England für Budgetwahrheit,” from which I quote a passage which gives a good example of Polanyi’s sociological bent:

Die parteipolitische Drarnatisierung der Budgetdebatte dient in England einem geistig-moralischen, Zweck von höchster volksbildnerische Bedeutung. Was dern Unverständnis als Schlagwortpolitik dUnken mag, ist in Wahrheit em Kampf urn sachlich gebundene Symbole, an denen sich das Verantwortungsbewusstsein eines ganzen Volkes schult. Die Einschatzung des vernünftigerweise zu erwartenden Ueberschusses wird zum Massstab der Vorsicht und des Ernstes, mit der sich die Bevolkerung ihren Zukunftsaufgaben widmet, die Zustimmung oder die Ablehnung der vollen Arbeitslosenunterstützung wird zum Prlifstein der sozialen Gesinnung der Regierung… [13]

10. “Sozialistische Rechnungslegung,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 49 (1922), 377-420. Polanyi’s concern, at this time as later, was with the quality of social life rather than the details of economic organization. For the quite different issues with which economists at the time were concerned see Maurice Dobb, “The Discussion of the ‘Twenties on Planning and Economic Growth,” Soviet Studies 17 (1965) no. 2, 198-208 (reprinted in Dobb, Papers on Capitalism, Development and Planning [London, 1967], 126-13 9).

11. 23 June 1934, 841 ff.; cf. 2 June, 781 if., “Lancashire im Fegefeuer.” (Polanyi continued to write for the Osterreichische Völkswirt from England during the latter part of 1933, and 1934.)

12. 24 December 1932, 301-303; cf. GT, 33-34.

13. 28 April 1934, 669 if. R. Firth’s comment on a New Guinea cooperative society’s [subscribers’ meeting provides a striking parallel: “The public character of this presentation, its formal, almost ritual atmosphere, and the organisation involved, all show the serious committal to community purposes which marks so many of the large-scale economic enterprises of the New Guinea people” (Essays on Social Organisation and Values [London, 1964], 202).]

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Sir Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, mentions a discussion on the methods of the social sciences with Polanyi during this period which is of some interest. “The theory that while the physical sciences are based on a methodological nominalism, the social sciences must adopt essentialist (‘realistic’) methods, has been made clear to me by K. Polanyi (in 1925); he pointed out, at that time, that a reform of the methodology of the social sciences might conceivably be achieved by abandoning this theory.” Popper adds: “The nominalist attitude in sociology can be developed, I think, only as a technological theory of social institutions.” [14] Methodological nominalism “instead of aiming at finding out what a thing really is, and at defining its true nature [which is the aim of essentialism]... aims at describing how a thing behaves, and especially, whether there are any regularities in its behaviour.” [15] This record throws an interesting light on preoccupations which Polanyi came to express much later in Trade and Market. His concern there with the problem of defining “the economy” is indeed a typically essentialist one; but his decision to concentrate on institutions and the operational analysis of patterns of economic behavior in “applying the substantive approach... to a classification of empirical economies and... trade, money and market institutions” [16] is nominalist. “Process and institutions together form the economy. Some students stress the material resources and equipment - the ecology and technology - which make up the process; others, like myself, prefer to point to the institutions through which the economy is organized. Again, in inquiring into the institutions one can choose between values and motives on the one hand and physical operations on the other, either of which can be regarded as linking the social relations with the process. Perhaps because I happen to be more familiar with the institutional and operational aspects of man’s livelihood, I prefer to deal with the economy primarily as a matter of organization, and to define organization in terms of the operations

14. The Open Society ... I, 190, n.30.

15. Ibid. I, 26-27. This interest in nominalism can be traced back to the discussions of the Galilei Circle, in which the theories of Ernst Mach were an important influence. The Circle’s second publication was a translation by Polanyi of part of Mach’s Analyse der Empfindungen (Tomory, op. cit., 197, n.48: Mach Ernö, Az érzékletek elemzése c. munkdjdnak 3 elsö fejezete, Polányi Károly forditásában [Budapest, 1910]). If I am right in supposing that Polanyi tried to apply Mach’s method in the social sciences, this is a new example of the wide range of Mach’s influence - which deserves further study.

16. Polanyi, “Anthropology and Economic Theory,” Readings in Anthropology II, ed. Morton H. Fried (New York, 1959), 165; cf. TM, 245.

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characteristic of the working of the institutions…” [17] The distrust of theories about motives expressed here can again be linked with early discussions with Popper stressing that sociology must study institutions and not “human nature”; “social institutions... must have existed prior to what some people are pleased to call ‘human nature’ and to human psychology.” [18]

Polanyi’s thought is also clearly related to the main movement of this period in sociology, the exploration of the sociology of knowledge. His assertion that economic theory is valid only for the analysis of the society which produced it belongs, in this context, with Lukacs’ “Der Funktionswechsel des historischen Materialismus” (Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein [Berlin, 1923], 229-260), Eduard Heimann’s article “Sociological Preoccupations of Economic Theory” in Social Research 1 (1934), Adolf Lowe’s lectures at the London School of Economics on Economics and Sociology, published the following year, [19] and Talcott Parsons’ discussion of “The Motivations of Economic Activities,” which appeared in 1940. [20] Pointless controversy has been generated by the treatment of Polanyi’s views as an attack on the development economics of the 1960’s, when they really belong to this totally different line of thought.

2. 1933-1947: England

Although The Great Tranformation draws extensively on historical material collected in England, the effect of Polanyi’s stay there and of English contacts on his thought is difficult to assess. He spent part of the period lecturing in the United States, and The Great Transformation was written at Bennington

17. City Invincible: An Oriental Institute Symposium, ed. Carl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams (Chicago, 1960), 330.

18. The Open Society and Its Enemies II, 89-90, with 308, n.11. Polanyi’s emphasis on operations probably owes something also to George A. Lundberg’s sociological theory of “operational definitions”; Polanyi may have come in contact with Lundberg when he was at Bennington College in 1943. But he was already familiar with a similar methodological approach from his study of Mach.

19. I have to thank Jean Floud for directing me to the work of Lowe and Heimann. Heimann admired GT, which he cites several times in Freedom and Order (New York, 1947), Reason and Faith in Modern Society: Liberalism, Marxism and Democracy (Middletown, Conn., 1961; German ed., 1955) and Soziale Theorie der Wirtschaftssysteme (Tubingen, 1963), though for its historical analysis rather than its policy. Lowe evidently did not; he never refers to it, nor does K. Mannheim. The Making of Economic Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), by Lowe’s pupil Robert Heilbroner, seems to me, pace G. Dalton (Essays, xii, n.4), to be little influenced by Polanyi.

20. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 6 (1940), 187-203 (Essays in Sociological Theory [Glencoe, III., 1954], 50-68). Polanyi also had much in common with the American “Institutionalist” economists, though I doubt if institutionalism directly influenced his work to any significant extent.

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College, first published in New York (1944), and had a much greater success in America than in England. Yet he says in his introduction that the main thesis of the book was developed while lecturing for the W.E.A. in England in 1939-40; so the influence of the new English historical material (which might seem now of minor importance, since it played no part in the later development of his work) in the genesis of his theories should not be underrated. Polanyi had already been concerned with workers’ education as part of the activities of the Galilei Circle in Budapest; his admiration for English socialism, as well as his evident gift for teaching, must have made his lectures to English workers on the history of socialism in England a stimulating experience for him, as well as for his hearers. [21] And the political and economic preoccupations of his Austrian years were of course equally relevant in England. Concern with tracing the causes of Fascism was naturally especially prominent among refugee thinkers who were frequently asked for accounts of its development and felt it one of their main tasks to give the English public a clearer idea of what they were fighting against; and the main theme of The Great Transformation, the need for a planned socialist economy and the rejection of the argument that only a free market system could preserve liberal values, was an equally central topic of discussion. [22]

Polanyi’s advocacy of economic planning as the cure for the ills of society was criticized by a reviewer for its impracticality, [23] and this again was characteristic of the period in which it was written. The economic crises of the prewar period, the shock of the rise of Fascism and the second world war, and the feeling that the war years represented an interlude of temporary expedients in government which when peace came would give way to an extensive reform and reconstruction of society, produced a strongly Utopian current of thought in all but the most steadfast minds; a Utopianism which took the form of visions of a morally regenerated society rather than concrete proposals for changes in the social system. [24] This concern with moral and religious issues

21. For the teaching activities of the Galilei Circle see Tomory, op cit. Polanyi’s admiration for English socialism is clear in his articles for the Osterreichische Völkswirt.

22. On Fascism see Polanyi’s W.E.A. pamphlet Europe Today (London, h937), and his chapter “The Essence of Fascism” in Christianity and the Social Revolution, ed. Polanyi, John D. Lewis, and Donald Kitchin (London, 1935), 359-394. For debate on the compatibility or incompatibility of planning and freedom cf. the work in this period of, e.g., Heimann, Popper, Mannheim, Michael Polanyi, and F. A. von Hayek.

23. George J. Hildebrand, Jr., American Economic Review 36 (1946), 398-405.

24. E.g., P. A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook (New York, 1941); idem, The Reconstruction of Humanity (Boston, 1948); K. Mannheim, Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist (London, 1943). On Mannheim and Utopianism, see Judith Shklar, “The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia,” Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed Frank E. Manuel (Boston, 1966), 101-115. Manuel, “Toward a Psychological History of Utopias,” ibid., 69-98 (“Contemporary Eupsychias,” 86-95) shows that Utopianism is not, as is often claimed, [defunct. Polanyi (admittedly a very minor figure as a Utopian) is of some interest as standing midway between the old economic Utopianism and the “Utopias of love,” if one may so call them, discussed by Manuel. The Hippies might be regarded as the Utopian movement corresponding to this new type of Utopian theory. (Cf. S. N. Eisenstadt, Essays on Comparative Institutions [New York, 1965], 146-174, “Changing Patterns of Youth Problems in Contemporary Societies.”)]

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can clearly be seen in the group of socialists and communists with whom Polanyi collaborated in writing Christianity and the Social Revolution shortly after his arrival in England.

The combination of a defense of socialist economics with an explanation of the causes of Fascism and a history of the rise and fall of laissez-faire capitalism is a remarkably ambitious program, but characteristic of the preoccupation of the time. What is more surprising is that The Great Transformation should also have included a discussion of primitive economics containing suggestions for new lines of research which were still able to stimulate anthropologists many years later.

Despite the importance of Malinowski as a source for Polanyi’s account of primitive trade, and his admiration for the work of Radcliffe-Brown (Polanyi’s stress on the integration of primitive society, and disregard of the existence of competition and conflict, resembles the approach of the structural-functional school of British anthropology), this development of Polanyi’s thought seems more closely related to the tradition of Bücher, Tönnies, Max Weber, Sombart, and, more immediately, Thurnwald, than to any contacts made in England. [25] In fact the strength of his approach was its methodological originality and wide range of comparisons in a period when anthropology and to some extent sociology, too, were dominated by concern with fieldwork, and the establishment of both subjects in the universities had narrowed the cultural background of their recruits, who no longer had the prior training in handling historical material which had formed the foundation for the comparative studies of men like Weber and Mauss.

Polanyi’s interest in anthropological material was of course part of his Utopian outlook; the influence of primitivism and romanticism has often been strong in economic history, and this period would make an interesting study. The apparent failure of economists to control the crises of the inter-war years shook faith in economic theory and opened the field to eclectic searches in comparative economics for new doctrines. [26] The classical scholar Bernhard

25. Polanyi’s account of reciprocity, GT, 54 ff., is based on Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922); his conception of redistribution was of course derived from Thurnwald (Economics in Primitive Communities [London, 1932], 106-108; cf. Polanyi’s “Notes on Sources,” GT, 261-270).

26. E.g., Ernst Kelter, Geschichte der obrigkeitliche Preisregelung. 1. Die obr. Preisregelung in der Zeit der mittelalterlichen Stadtwirtschaft (Jena, 1935); J. Lacour-Gayet, Platon et l’économie dirigée (Paris, 1945); Vernon A. Mund, Open Markets, An Essential of Free Enterprise (New York, 1948); Paul Einzig, Primitive Money (London, [1949); F. Simiand, “La Monnaie réalité sociale,” Annales Sociologiques ser. D, 1 (1934), 1-58, with a discussion by Mauss et al., 59-86. For the conception of the later Roman Empire as a “totalitarian” economy see the bibliography in F. M. Heicheiheim, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Altertums II (Leiden, 1948), 1123 f. (ch. 8, n.1), and T. Frank, Economic Survey of the Roman Empire V (Baltimore, 1940), 303.]

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Laum, [27] for instance, moved from a study of the religious aspects of the economy in ancient Greece to an historical justification of the Nazi “closed economy” (Geschbossene Wirtschaft, 1933) and a chair in economic history. The preface to Laum’s later Schenkende Wirtschaft (1960), in which he recalls the impression made on him by the wholesale dumping and destruction of food in the ‘thirties, is a useful reminder that these irrational attempts to discover solutions to the economic crisis in the remote past corresponded to a situation in which the policy laid down by economic theory produced results which seemed to be in glaring contradiction with social rationality.

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