More baby & the bathwater arguments ...
On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, Albert J Bergesen wrote:
> ...
> But to the peninsula people, when their time came to ascend in this
> Afroeruasian system, to be a temporary center--1750 to 2050--they
> wrote it up as something they did on their own, by themselves,
> independent of the larger world system--their protestant ethic,
> their relations of production (which they coined the term
> "capitalism"--as if only they were interested in accumulating
> capital), their capitalist state, their modern outlook, their
> individualism, their initiative, while the rest, they were
> "traditional" (Daniel Lerner), they had "huadralic/bureaucratic
> modes of production" (Wittfogel), they did business by
> "redistributing" (Polanyi) not trading/exchanging, they had
> "no rationality" (Weber), they had the sluggish, resistant to
> innovation, resistant to change, the same for centuries, totally
> controlling, stifflying, "Asiatic Mode of Production" (Marx), ...
What is Polanyi's forms of distribution doing in this list? The
argument that the forms of distribution fall into three general patterns
(i.e., reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange) is more against European
exceptionalism than for it (unless the argument is that descriptions of
reciprocal exchange and the Kola ring do not put small Pacific Island
societies in their proper place as the center of the Afrasian World
System?!?) And it would also seem to be against European exceptionalism to
relegate the "pure market economy" of classical liberal imagination *to*
the classical liberal imagination, in arguing that an economy regulated by
that form of distribution alone is an unsustainable economy. In line with
original institutionalist thought: many of the details of institutions of
"capitalist" economies are unique to Europe in precisely the same way and
for precisely the same reason that different polynesian clan institutions
were unique to different island groups.
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au