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Karl Polanyi and the Modernity-versus-Postmodernity Debate

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10848770701443346

1470-1316

Eyüp Özveren,

Globalization and Cultural Identity

Abstract The originality of Karl Polanyi's work in the interwar period has gained increasing recognition in recent years, during which time the major debate on modernity has erupted. In order to link Polanyi's work with this debate, I will first discuss his legacy on the controversial concept of progress, and then relate his position to this debate. It is my contention that Polanyi's position combines the better aspects of the two rival approaches to modernity. I will then re-link Polanyi's thought to the intellectual figures, movements and climate of his time and thereby disclose a curious affinity between his thought and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. This affinity can best be understood within the parameters of the historical context that they once shared. Notes NOTES 1. See J. Ron Stanfield, “The Institutional Economics of Karl Polanyi,” Journal of Economic Issues 14.3 (1980): 593–614; Walter C. Neale, “Karl Polanyi and American Institutionalism: A Strange Case of Convergence,” in The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi, ed. Kari Polanyi-Levitt (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 145–51. 2. The institutional economic approach founded by Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons was a novelty in the turn-of-the-century scene. As neoclassical economics was then becoming the new orthodoxy, the institutionalists such as Wesley C. Mitchell, Walter Hamilton, Clarence E. Ayres, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Warren J. Samuels maintained a certain distance from the tendency to associate everything with the efficient working of the market by way of an invisible hand that linked the fortunes of numerous individuals. As heirs to nineteenth-century historical economists, the institutionalists insisted that the economy was neither reducible to the market, nor was the market traceable to the unstructured interaction of infinitely many participants. Despite the ups and downs in their fortunes, for virtually a century to come, the institutionalists, broadly defined to include not only the American institutionalists but their European contemporaries like Karl Polanyi, Joseph A. Schumpeter, K. William Kapp, and Gunnar Myrdal, remained the constant legitimate opposition vis-à-vis the economic orthodoxy. See Eyüp Özveren, “An Institutionalist Alternative to Neoclassical Economics?” Review, Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 21.4 (1998): 469–530. 3. See Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989). According to a novel position that questions the validity of the whole debate, postmoderns “have accepted their adversaries’ playing field,” that is, they take it for granted that we were modern (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 48). If, however, we have never in fact been modern, it follows that both positions are no longer tenable. While there may be a grain of truth in this argument, we believe this position is of no great service to placing Polanyi in the intellectual matrix of his own as well as our times. 5. See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), and Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 6. The concept of “modernity” has already made its way into the literature on Polanyi. Despite their ambitious titles that emphasize “modernity,” such works do not explicitly attempt to situate Polanyi's work vis-à-vis the coordinates of the debate in question. See Carlo Gambescia, “La critica della modernita economica in Karl Polanyi,” Tragressioni: Un percorso nell'eresia 8.1 (1993); Jean Michel Servet, Jérome Maucourant, and André Tiran, eds., La Modernité de Karl Polanyi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). 7. Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, “Beyond the Economistic Fallacy: The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi,” in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 47–84; Michael Burawoy, “For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi,” Politics & Society 31.2 (2003): 193–261. 8. It is surprising that a recent study of impressive coverage and intellectual depth that aims to construct a postmodern version of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School nevertheless fails to mention Polanyi's name. See Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Barbarian Temperament: Toward a Postmodern Critical Theory (Routledge: London, 1993). 9. Cioran, De l’inconvénient d’être né (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 153. Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in the idyllic Transylvanian countryside of what is today Romania. He was part of the so-called “27 generation” that included Mircea Eliade and Eugene Ionesco. Cioran moved to Paris in 1937 shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War where he spent the rest of his life. He is reported to have said “I have no nationality—the best possible status for an intellectual” “Obituary,” The Guardian, June 23, 1995. He remained an uncompromising critic of the idea of progress. 10. David Frisby, “Walter Benjamin's Prehistory of Modernity as Anticipation of Postmodernity? Some Methodological Reflections,” in ‘With the Sharpened Axe of Reason’: Approaches to Walter Benjamin, ed. Gerhard Fischer (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 15–32. 11. Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 62. He also planned to put out a literary review with a religious perspective of the same name in 1922. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company, 1973), 199. 12. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken Books, 1968), 257–58. 13. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 179, 229. 14. Robert B Ekelund Jr. and Robert F. Hébert, A History of Economic Theory and Method (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997). 15. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 16. Robert Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 6. 17. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (London: The Free Press of Glencoe Collier-Macmillan, 1950), 421–22. 18. The symptoms of the coming age of uncertainty concerning the idea of progress were already witnessed in the fin-de-siècle atmosphere signaling the approaching chaos. This chaos would be nothing less than the downfall of what Polanyi called “the nineteenth century civilization,” manifest in the turn-of-the-century Vienna as Carl Schorske so admirably depicted, and so dear to writers such as the Austrian Stefan Zweig. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). Like Cioran was to profess decades later, Zweig admirably aspired to be a citoyen du monde and yet became a true European at a time when Europe itself was shattered to pieces, only to be forced by the relentless circumstances into the status of a most unfortunate Heimatlos just like Benjamin during the Second World War. See Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europaers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998). 19. Block and Somers, “Beyond the Economistic Fallacy,” 47. Marx deployed the theme of alienation of labor in his critique of capitalism. However, he was a believer in progress who hailed capitalism for its progressive role in history. He thought the ills of alienation could be overcome by the elimination of private property. This is why we exclude Marx from the above list of dissidents. 20. Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79. 21. See Immanuel Wallerstein, Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth Century Paradigms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), and Open the Social Sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 22. See Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences. 23. Jürgen Habermas, “Die Moderne-ein unvollendetes Projekt,” in Die Moderne—ein unvollendetes Projekt (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 1990), 32–54. 24. Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London: Tavistock, 1974), 1. 25. Karl Polanyi, “Anthropology and Economic Theory,” in Readings in Anthropology, Vol. II: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, ed. Morton H. Fried (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1959), 173. 26. Karl Polayi, “The Economy as Instituted Process,” in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, ed. Karl Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg, and Harry Pearson (New York: Free Press, 1957), 250–56. 27. William C. Schaniel and Walter C. Neale, “Karl Polanyi's Forms of Integration as Ways of Mapping,” Journal of Economic Issues 34.1 (2000): 100. 28. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 50. 29. Polanyi, “Anthropology and Economic Theory,” 173–74. 30. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 60. 31. Ibid., 250. 32. In a passage that looked approvingly at the ongoing demise of the nineteenth-century order, Polanyi characterized the market system as “a distinct stage in the history of the industrial civilization” Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 5. This may at first sight give the impression that he adhered to a stage theory of civilization. However, I insist that this would be a very narrow-minded and out of context interpretation of the quotation. In any case, what is far more important in this quotation is the acknowledgment of the possibility of an industrial civilization without the market system. 33. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 154. 34. Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 113. 35. Bronislaw Malinowski, Freedom and Civilization (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947), 277. 36. Ibid., 180. 37. Ibid., 157. 38. Elspeth Graham, Joe Doherty, and Mo Malek, eds. “Introduction: The Context and Language of Postmodernism,” in Postmodernism and the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1992), 1–23. 39. See Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?”. 40. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 199. 41. For the sake of simplicity, we ignore the debate between Habermas and Hans Georg-Gadamer concerning whether or not reason also rests on a set of prejudices, or put differently, whether or not the critique is embedded within the tradition. James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 18–20. While important for other purposes, these points do not pertain to assessing Polanyi's contribution and originality. 42. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?”, in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?, 382–98. 43. Peter Osborne, “Modernity Is a Qualitative not a Chronological Category: Notes on the Dialectics of Differential Historical Time,” in Postmodernism and the Re-reading of Modernity, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 36. 44. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity; Jonathan Arac, introduction to Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), ix-xliii. 45. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices,” in Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?, 399–425. This position has stirred controversy. See Maurizio Passerin D’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Whether with this turn Habermas conceded the pre-theoretical interest of critical theorists in emancipation also remains contested. Axel Honneth, “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: Situating Critical Theory Today,” in Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Peter Dews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 320–37. 46. Martin Jay, “Habermas and Postmodernism,” in his Fin-de-Siècle Socialism and Other Essays (London: Routledge, 1988), 148. 47. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv. 48. In fact, the first generation of the Frankfurt School theorists tried in vain to recruit Benjamin to their Institute in New York, and Benjamin had already collaborated with them while working on his project of the Passagen-Werk. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 197; and Rolf Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 191–97. 49. See Theodor W. Adorno, et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1976), and Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). 50. Block and Somers, “Beyond the Economistic Fallacy,” 76. 51. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1979), xiii. 52. Ibid., xi, xv. 53. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961). 54. Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969 (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 94.