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Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), studied law and philosophy,
and was called to the bar in Budapest in 1912. He served
as a cavalry officer in the war of 1914—18. From 1924
to 1933 he was foreign affairs editor of Der Oesterreichische
Volkswirt in Vienna. He emigrated to England in 1933, and
lectured for the Workers Educational Association and for
the extra-mural departments of the universities of Oxford
and London. He was joint editor of Christianity and the
Social Revolution (1935), to which he contributed a chapter,
“The Essence of Fascism.”
His work in economic history was done in the United
States, from 1940 to 1943 as resident scholar at Benning
ton College, and from 1947 until his retirement in 1953,
as Professor of Economics at Columbia University. From
1953 to 1958 he and Professor Conrad M. Arensberg were
joint directors of a research project on the economic as
pects of institutional growth.
The first of Polanyi’s three principal works, The Great
Transformation (1944), was concerned with the structure
of nineteenth century capitalism and the enormity of its
social consequences. His second book, Trade and Market
in the Early Empires (1957), edited with Conrad M. Arens
berg and Harry W. Pearson, created a theoretical frame
work for the study of economies which were neither in
dustrialized nor organized by market institutions. His last
work, published posthumously — Dahomey and the Slave
Trade (1966)—analyzed the internal economic organization
of the eighteenth century West African kingdom, and the
economic organization of its external trade in slaves with
Europeans.
George Dalton is Professor of Economics and Anthro
pology at Northwestern University and a staff member of
its Program of African Studies. He received his B.A. de
gree from Indiana University, M.A. from Columbia Uni
versity, and, in 1959, his Ph.D. from the University of
Oregon. In 1961—62 he spent fifteen months in West
Africa, and is co-author of a volume on the Liberian
economy, Growth without Development: An Economic
Survey of Liberia (1966). With Paul Bohannan, he edited
Markets in Africa (1962). He has published articles on
economic anthropology, comparative economy, and eco
nomic development, and has edited a volume of readings
in economic anthropology, Tribal and Peasant Economies
(1967).
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To
Ilona Duczynska Polanyi
Copyright © 1968 by George Dalton
First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1971 by arrangement with
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian
Universalist Association.
International Standard Book Number: 0-8070—4793-7
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada by Saunders of Toronto, Ltd.
Copyright © The Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd. 1969
First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1971 by arrangement
with The Macmillan Company
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the
Unitarian Universalist Association
International Standard Book Number: 0-8070-1535-0
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Editor’s Note
Introduction ix
Part I. Economy and Society
1. Societies and Economic Systems (1944) 3
2. The Self-regulating Market and the Fictitious
Commodities: Land, Labor, and Money
(1944) 26
3. Class Interest and Social Change (1944) 38
4. Our Obsolete Market Mentality (1947) 59
5. Aristotle Discovers the Economy (1957) 78
6. The Place of Economies in Societies (with
C. M. Arensberg and H. W. Pearson, 1957) 116
7. The Economy as Instituted Process (1957) 139
8. The Semantics of Money-Uses (1957) 175
Part II. Primitive and Archaic Economies
9. Redistribution: The State Sphere in Eighteenth-
Century Dahomey (1966) 207
10. Ports of Trade in Early Societies (1963) 238
11. Sortings and “Ounce Trade” in the West
African Slave Trade (1964) 261
12. Archaic Economic Institutions: Cowrie Money
(1966) 280
13. On the Comparative Treatment of Economic
Institutions in Antiquity with Illustrations
from Athens, Mycenae, and Alalakh (1960) 306
Index 335
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Karl Polanyi, 1947
/V
PRIMITIVE, ARCHAIC,
AND
MODERN ECONOMIES
Essays of Karl Polanyi
EDITED BY GEORGE DALTON
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Editor’s Note
The essays in this volume originally appeared between
1944 and 1966 as chapters of four books and articles in
four journals. The purpose of bringing them together is
to make them easily accessible to students of economic
anthropology, economic history, and comparative eco
nomic systems along with an expository Introduction to
Polanyi’s work. The appendices to Essays 6 and 8 are com
piled from unpublished memoranda Polanyi distributed to
his students.
The essays are reprinted here with slight changes in punc
tuation, and, in a few instances, deletion or substitution of
a word to make the meaning clearer. There are also oc
casional editorial insertions [in square brackets] to add an
explanatory word, to comment on difficult matters, or to
refer the reader to related writings. The place and date of
original publication appear at the beginning of each essay.
(The editor regrets his inability to track down the sources
of several of the brief quotations Polanyi cites without
reference.)
Introduction'-
BY GEORGE DALTON
It is only our Western societies that quite recently
turned man into an economic animal.—marcel mauss
Karl Polanyi was a warm, generous, and committed
man whose enormous range of interests spanned all the
social sciences and beyond.2 His was an original mind al
though he never claimed excessive originality. In his lec
tures at Columbia and in print he emphasized his indebted
ness to Marx, Maine, Bucher, Weber, Thumwald, Pirenne,
Menger, Malinowski, and others. His concept of “redistri
bution” as an integrative mode of economic organization,
and much that he said about money, external trade, market
places, ports of trade, operational devices, and the birth
and reform of industrial capitalism, was, I believe, original
with him. His forceful presentation and keen insight made
us aware of economies of record in ways different from
the distinguished writers from whom he learned much.
The qualities that made him a brilliant lecturer also
made him a difficult writer. His passionate commitment
and enormous learning drew large numbers of students to
1 This Introduction is an expanded and revised version of a
paper given at the Annual Spring Meetings of the American
Ethnological Society, 1965 [20]. I am grateful to Joseph S.
Berliner, Paul Bohannan, Edward Budd, Robert Campbell,
Helen Codere, J. R. T. Hughes, Walter Neale, and Ilona Polanyi
for their critical comments.
2 Karl Polanyi died in April 1964.
ix
PRIMITIVE, ARCHAIC, AND MODERN ECONOMIES
his lectures, several of whom made his research interests
their own [13, 59, 65].3 But what was forceful, lucid,
and articulate in the lecture hall sometimes became hyper
bole and polemic in print. A friend sympathetic to his work
describes Polanyi’s writing style as a stiletto set in the
far end of a battering ram. Academics do not always like
to be lectured at in print [79, 85].
Polanyi’s substance is also difficult. To discuss Ricardo’s
England, Malinowski’s Trobriand Islands, and Hitler’s Ger
many in the same book (The Great Transformation) is
to demand much of the reader; but to expect the reader
to follow him into Hammurabi’s Babylonia, Aristotle’s
Greece, and eighteenth-century Dahomey (Trade and
Market in the Early Empires) is to expect altogether too
much.
However, in the very range of economies he analyzes
and draws from, lies one of his principal contributions:
that a theory of economic anthropology becomes possible
only when primitive and archaic economies are regarded
as part of comparative economic systems. To understand
what is special to the economies anthropologists deal with
and what they share with all other economies requires com
parative analysis of the kind Polanyi provides. In order for
anthropologists to see what is analytically important in Tro-
briands’ economy they must first understand the structure
of industrial capitalism [15, 16]; to understand the
special usage of pig-tusk and cowrie money, they must first
understand the organization and usage of dollars and francs
[19]. One reason why theory in economic anthropology
remains underdeveloped is that anthropologists have not
brought to the economic branch of their subject the same
comparative grounding they bring to kinship, law, politics,
and religion.
3 The numbers and citations in brackets refer to bibliographi
cal references, listed at the end of this Introduction.
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