Preliminary Notes to "Azimuth" 1/2015: "Rethinking Exchange. Itineraries through Economy, Sociology and Philosophy" (original) (raw)

Exchange in the human economy revisited: Polanyi, Mauss and Marx

2008

This essay was written in August 2008 for a book that then folded, a month before my retirement from British universities (but not from academic life), a month before the financial crash. I discovered it in my folders much later and found it to be one of the better products of my thinking on the human economy. 2007-8 saw my first conference and publication on that idea (Hart 2008). The owl of Minerva (wisdom) takes wing at dusk (Hegel). There are six sections: 1. In the wake of market fundamentalism 2. Our moment in world history 3. Karl Polanyi vs. Adam Smith 4. Marcel Mauss' economic movement from below 5. Commoditization: The dialectics of social abstraction 6. Money in a human economy' I have now edited it and added some references to my own publications since 2008, including relevant posts on Academia at https://goldsmiths.academia.edu/KeithHart (Papers and Drafts) and a link to my latest book, Self in the World (Hart 2022).

The Metaphysics of Economic Exchanges

Journal of Social Ontology, 2017

What are economic exchanges? The received view has it that exchanges are mutual transfers of goods motivated by inverse valuations thereof. As a corollary, the standard approach treats exchanges of services as a subspecies of exchanges of goods. We raise two objections against this standard approach. First, it is

Exchange, Action, and Social Structure: Elements of Economic Sociology

Contemporary Sociology, 2002

This unique volume provides a new interpretation and synthesis of network exchange theory in an effort to contribute to a neo-Weberian economic sociology. Arguing against commonly held assumptions about network exchange theory and its interpretation of all social ...

The Process of Exchange from Phenomenological Perspective

This short essay will be an attempt to analyze the exchange of money and commodities in terms of framework offered by phenomenology. Marx’s Capital is an utterly phenomenological work in the Hegelian sense of this notion. Marx conceptualizes phenomenology as a method of exposing the real-world phenomena that is prior to abstract philosophical inquiry. In the first volume of Capital Marx introduces explanatory categories of the German Idealism to “purely” economical and social issues. This sense his analysis is close to the one found in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. Foucault, who is mainly preoccupied with understanding the establishment of certain subject (in this context the modern economic subject), deals here with the notion of wealth and elaborates changing relations between money and prices between 15th and late 17th century, as well as such issues as mercantilism, utility and creation of value. There are significant differences between Marx’s and Foucault’s approach. Whereas Foucault’s analysis is oriented towards the hermeneutics and deconstruction of the notion of exchange as a constitutive activity of the subject, Marx is mainly preoccupied with the description of the activity of exchanging and its consequences. However, even though conclusions of Capital and The Order of Things differ significantly, the method of analysis reveals many similarities. Thus, both texts operate with a structure of deeper understanding of exchange as a multi-layer process of signification, accumulation, and transformation. The essay is an attempt to briefly analyze all of these functions of the exchange process as well as to indicate a new interpretation that arises from the framework offered by both authors.