The Passage West by Giacomo Marramao

Author:Giacomo Marramao
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Despite the technocratic illusion that can be detected in this final proposal, Soros’ diagnosis posits three demands that are difficult to escape:2 1) a differential analysis of the market form; 2) the observance of the ‘non-mercantilist’ presuppositions of the regulation and functioning of the market; 3) the critique of the paradigm of equilibrium understood as the natural vocation of the free market. This last motif – the disenchantment concerning the ‘self-regulated market’ – brings us back to the theme that lay at the heart of Polanyi’s analysis of the ‘great transformation’.

The Great Transformation was composed in 1944 but, as Michele Cangiani has correctly noted, it was assimilated only much later. It is little consolation that the thirty-year delay in the appearance of an Italian edition is less than the forty-year delay in the French translation. Nonetheless, in this case the date of publication is not unimportant to the fate of the work. Given the time it was published in Italy, 1974, it is entirely natural that it became – for the most part – incorporated into the debate on ‘neo-corporativism’ and ‘corporatist pluralism’ that, at that time, was particularly intense. This created enormous problems of an interpretive and historiographical order. The motifs that were emphasised to bring the analysis up to date meant that the overall design of the work was overlooked. Conceived as an interpretation of the origins of our time within the mitteleuropean milieu of the great Viennese culture, the Vienna of the exchange between diverse cultural and disciplinary languages, the author linked those origins (following a periodisation that was not at all obvious or, as we shall see, painless) to the period between the wars. Cangiani has observed that the book is characterised by the will to contest the neo-liberal tendencies of Hayek and Schumpeter’s theorisation of neo-classical democracy of the time, in a sort of transatlantic continuation of the celebrated Viennese disputes. George Dalton underlined how Polanyi was, fundamentally, captivated by two great problems throughout his investigations. The first was that of the origin, growth and transformation of capitalism in the nineteenth century. The second problem was, more generally, that of the relation between economy and society. The centrality of this latter theme shows Polanyi’s connection with another great social scientist of the 1900s, Max Weber, although they are distinguished by their distinct interpretations of the link between economy and society in primitive and ancient cultures. A first set of difficulties arises here. To speak of primitive and ancient systems brings us to a peculiarity of Polanyi’s path of investigation. He argued that the ancient phases of Western culture are able to furnish important interpretive results when compared to so-called primitive cultures, which form the object of anthropology. The core of the thesis consists in the equal treatment given to ‘ancient’ and ‘primitive’, historical distance and cultural distance, that is, by defining the distant peoples studied by ethnologists in the same way as ancient peoples ‘contemporaneous with us’. The theoretical weight given to this analogy gives us the measure of the divergence between Polanyi’s and Weber’s ‘comparativism’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.