Re: The Prize by Any Other Name

[Bruce McFarling <ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:00 27/11/01 -0800, Harry L Cook wrote:
>My point was that modern capitalism is a system made up of
>several independent institutions - money, banks, markets -
>and long driven by the incentive for economic improvement,
>that developed and evolved quite naturally throughout most
>of the Middle Ages.  They all began to come together as
>the Middle Ages gave way to the modern era and climaxed
>with the Industrial Revolution in England.

My point was that this story ignores the fact that most
of the commercial institutions evolved outside of the
economic backwater of Europe and was brought in ... but
of course that just changes the range of economic
histories that you have to look at to understand the
process, it is still an evolving process.

Polyani's point was that the inviability of the system
came about from the extension of commercial logic to
the determination of the major portion of the communities
labour and the major portion of the communities use of
natural resources.  Pointing out that the commercial
practices developed prior to taking over the major
role with respect to those two "fictitious commodities",
and that the adoption of commercial practices for
those fictitious commodities was itself an ongoing process
rather than a single event, doesn't really address
Polyani's argument about why the nineteenth century system
was inviable.  And *of course* there were outpost of
more developed economic systems in Europe, just as there
are outposts of more developed economic systems in almost
any less developed economy today.



Virtually,

Bruce McFarling, Shortland, NSW
ecbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx