Economics As Social Science by Marchionatti Roberto Cedrini Mario & Mario Cedrini

Author:Marchionatti, Roberto,Cedrini, Mario & Mario Cedrini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2016-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

5.2 Marshall Sahlins’s neo-substantivism

5.2.1 The substantivist school after Polanyi

During the 1960s, Polanyi’s and the substantivist school’s writings had a favourable resonance and wide influence in the community of social scientists and historians.

This provoked a strongly critical response by the formalist school – the anthropologists in particular (Harold Schneider, Edward LeClair, Frank Cancian, Robbins Burling and Scott Cook, the principal proponents of the formalist approach). Scott Cook defended the formalists’ point of view in an influential article (Cook 1966, see also Cook 1969), arguing above all with George Dalton and Paul Bohannan, the leaders of the substantivist school after Polanyi’s death in 1964. In his article, he defined the term of the debate between formalists and substantivists as follows. He maintained that “the substantivists’ intransigency concerning the cross-cultural applicability of formal economic theory is a by-product of a romantic ideology rooted in an antipathy toward the ‘market economy’ and an idealization of the ‘primitive’” (Cook 1966: 322–3). The difference between Western-type market and primitive-subsistence economies, he argued, is one of degree:

The Formalists may be characterized as those who focus on abstractions unlimited by time and place, and who are prone to introspection or are synchronically oriented; they are scientific in outlook and mathematical in inclination, favor the deductive mode of inquiry, and are basically analytic in methodology (i.e., lean toward the belief that parts determine the whole). The Romanticists, on the other hand, may be characterized as those who focus on situations limited in time and space, and who are prone to retrospection or are diachronically oriented; they are humanistic in outlook and non-mathematical in inclination, favor the inductive mode of inquiry, and are basically synthetic in methodology (i.e., lean toward the belief that the whole determines its parts).

(Ibid.: 327)

According to Cook, implicit in Polanyi’s writings is “a utopian model of primitive society” (ibid.) which minimizes the role of conflict, and is founded on a model of man “which emphasizes innate altruistic and cooperative propensities while playing down self-interest, aggressiveness, and competitiveness” – a vision borrowed from Rousseau, “the representative par excellence of this tradition” (ibid.). This anti-market mentality is contrasted by the principles and concepts of economic theory which, given certain “necessary but not critical modifications” (ibid.: 337), can be used in the analysis of non-market economic systems.

The formalists/substantivists debate peaked at the beginning of the 1970s with the publication of two books: Harold K. Schneider’s Economic Man (1974) and Marshall Sahlins’s Stone Age Economics (1972). Schneider, a student of Herskovits at Northwestern University, was an advocate of the formalist approach and his book was a manifesto for it. Sahlins’s book was considered the most important contribution at that time in the field of substantivist economic anthropology.

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