Christianity and the problem of 'stickiness'
Part I: Karl Polanyi and the Disembedding of Modern Societies
Jan 10th
From a sociological point of view, the great innovation of Judaism, and later Christianity, was the idea that individual people are created in the image of God (Imago Dei). All forms of individualism in modern society – both positive and negative – derive from this idea. It was monotheism, Moses’ original encounter with ‘I am who I am,’ that made possible the emergence of an individually accountable and conscious subject. For the first time in clannish/tribal history individuals rather than families were to be held accountable; and women to be recognized as persons (Deut 24: 16; Jer 31:29). But this potential took millennia to unfold in history. It is only fossil-fuelled capitalist modernization, the massive extension of the social division of labour, the seemingly endless increase in social complexity and unprecedented levels of social and spatial mobility, that have brought into being a true society of individuals.
Against the backdrop of a rapidly secularizing and disenchanted society, the problem for Christianity in general, and Catholics in particular, is clearly to evangelize and bring people back into a relationship with Christ. At the same time, sociologists such as Robert Putnam(Putnam, 2001, 2007; Rauch et al., 2015) have described the travails of modernity in terms of declining social capital – the breakdown of sticky relationships between individuals within communities (‘bonding capital’) and between social (ethnic, religious, class) groups (‘bridging capital’). In some ways, these are two sides of the same coin; aspects of the same problem.
The subjectivity of Imago Dei is intensely relational, with freedom being construed ultimately in terms of surrendering to the will of God. Christianity has always been predicated on a vision of liberation through self-constraint, obligation to others and love. In contrast, the interaction of the Rodinesque ‘thinking statues’ – the billiard ball individuals – of secular modernity is more akin to Brownian motion. Agency is construed self-referentially as self-actualization and self-determination. In the light of this, the political economy question facing Christians since the 18th century has been: how can the efficiency and efficacy of market society and its generative potential in relation to individuation and personal moral accountability be tamed by a communitarian tissue of love and mutual obligation? How a Market Society generate fully-rounded persons formed in relation to each other and to God, rather than abstracted, de-personalized billiard balls. This is more than the political question of how to temper social inequality and to create a social safety as a prerequisite for political stability. Social cohesion is secondary to the real problem of modernity which is how to secure forms of family, community and polity which form individuals as persons intimately and indivisibly in communion with God.
In what follows, I am going first of all to use the work of Karl Polanyi to describe the disembodying that is characteristic of modernity and creates what I call the problem of ‘stickiness.’ I will delineate also how Polanyi himself understood the options for moderating Market Society.
In a subsequent Part II, I will proceed to explore how a 21st century rendering of Catholic Social Theory might tame modernity without undermining the social and economic basis of individuation. This distributist and communitarian path forward is also the foundation for redeeming a widespread personalist relation to Christ, which is to say Christian evangelization.
Karl Polanyi: Capitalist Modernization as ‘The Great Transformation’
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; ...Inevitably society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganised industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way (Polanyi 1944, p. 3–4).
Polanyi (1944) described a ‘double movement’: out of pre-market, pre-modern, traditional society, the emergence of laissez faire, market-dominated industrialism; and the subsequent protectionist reactions which culminated eventually in the emergence of the broadly Keynesian welfare state. In his view, the central dynamic during Early Modern capitalism was the disembedding of ‘economic’ activity as a distinct domain, identifiable and separate from the wider cultural, religious, social and political institutions of society. Whilst forms of market exchange are a feature of all recorded human societies, it is only with the appearance of the self-regulating market economy ‘directed by market prices and nothing but market prices’ (ibid., p. 45) that the process of provisioning and livelihood comes to be organized almost entirely around individual incentives for economic gain. It is only with such disembedded forms of economy that resources are able to flow freely with a view to maximizing such gains. Hitherto invisible and indivisible from other dimensions of culture and politics, the substantive matrices of group activity associated with the provisioning of communities become a separate, visible and self-referential sphere, the domain of formal economics. With the emergence of the self-regulating market, ‘not blood tie, legal compulsion, religious obligation, fealty or magic [compel] participation in economic life, but specifically economic institutions such as private enterprise and the wage system’ (Polanyi 1968, p. 81).
Drawing on the economic anthropology of Malinowski (1922), Firth (1951), Thurnwald (1935, 1932) and Mead (1937), Polanyi showed that in all previous agrarian, horticultural and hunter-gathering societies the economy does not exist as a visible, comprehensible and separate domain ‘as such’. Individual activity associated with provisioning and livelihood was motivated primarily by the need to safeguard social standing and status, to fulfil ongoing patterns of (symmetrical) reciprocation or (asymmetrical) redistribution.1 The individual is a personalized rather than an ‘anonymous economic factor’ (Firth 1951, p. 137). In his account of the Trobrianders of Melanesia, Malinowski (1922, p. 167) argued that:
‘the whole of tribal life is permeated by constant give and take; that every ceremony, every legal and customary act is done to the accompaniment of material gift and counter-gift; that wealth, given and taken is one of the main instruments of social organization of the power of the chief, of the bonds of kinship and of relationships in law’.
In consequence of this, as Polanyi generalized, ‘subsistence livelihood in effect was guaranteed as a moral right of membership of a human community’ (Dalton, in Polanyi 1968, p. xiii).
The integrating principles of house-holding (autarchy), reciprocity (symmetrical non-market exchange), redistribution (asymmetrical transfers between more and less powerful actors) and market exchange were combined and weighted, argued Polanyi (1968), in different ways in different societies. But in most cases, trade was highly regulated and genuine price-setting markets played a supplementary and marginal role. For a century, sociologists had struggled to identify the distinctive feature of modernity in relation to the diverse, antecedent forms of economy and society in different parts of the world. Polanyi drew on Tönnies’s (1889) characterization of this transition from ‘gemeinschaft’ to ‘gesellschaft’: that is, from strong, ascriptive forms of social integration rooted in ties of kinship and place-bound community to more impersonal, contextually circumscribed, narrowly functional and instrumental affiliations associated with occupation and market exchanges, in the context of a much more extensive economic division of labour (Polanyi 1968, p. 83–84, see Dale 2008, 2011). Following Aristotle, he argued that a natural gemeinschaftlich community (koinonia), in which social functions are ascriptive and mediated by status rather than contract, coheres as a result of affective bonds between members (philia), expressed in turn through reciprocative behaviour (anti-peponthos).
The gradual disembedding of economic activity during the early modern period was associated principally with the creation of ‘fictitious commodities’ in labour and land, fictitious because they were either not produced in the first place (land), or not produced for sale (labour). Even into the early modern period, there were binding customary and legal limitations on market transactions involving land and labour. Echoing Marx, Polanyi argued that as an economic factor, labour was mediated by complex mutual obligations of master, journeyman and apprentice. Both internal and external trade was strictly controlled, often by guilds with a complex array of tolls and prohibitions limiting trade between towns. From the later Medieval period, mercantile pressures did result in the loosening and abolition of many of these customary, local constraints, but often only to be replaced by more intrusive national state regulation (Stewart 2009, p. 766).
In England, the trauma occasioned by the enclosure movement, which gathered pace after the Civil War and peaked toward the turn of the nineteenth century, was a consequence of the wholesale removal of such limitations. With regard to land, this involved the stripping away of cross-cutting interdependencies, rights and obligations of the commons, which ensured that usage did not coincide with legal tenure. Citing Bentham’s view that the prosperity of agriculture (read capitalist modernization) was facilitated to the extent that ‘there are no entails, no inalienable endowments, no common lands, no rights or redemptions, no tithes’ (1944, p. 189), Polanyi suggested that this process of ‘disembedding’ was deliberate and strategic in nature. With regard to labour, the combination of enclosure and ‘emancipation’ removed the substantive moral right to subsistence attached to group membership. Together with the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800 which banned workers unions, this saw the beginnings of a competitive labour market (Stewart 2009, p. 766–767). Polanyi compared the resulting plight of the English working class in the early nineteenth century – ‘the detribalised, degraded natives of their time’ (1944, p. 290) – to indigenous populations disrupted and exploited under colonialism.
The Counter-movement for Societal Protection
For Polanyi, the image of the self-regulating market promulgated by the classical liberal economists was mythical for two reasons. Firstly, all economic processes are fundamentally ‘instituted.’ Market Society was no exception and depended, Polanyi argued (echoing Weber), on an effective if minimal state with the capacity to collect taxes, enforce a monopoly on violence, and regulate a single currency across a designated national economic space. Secondly, Market Society was not self-sustaining and depended on the external reproduction of fictitious commodities of land and labour, namely the continuing vitality, productivity and ecological integrity of ecological systems (land), and the reproduction of labour power within coherent communities. But self-regulating markets were so destructive of social capital and community that, almost immediately, pressure grew for state interventions, engendering an arc of protective counter-movement which started with limited factory legislation and proliferating forms of voluntary association, charity and self-help and ended with a comprehensive system of national insurance, means-tested welfare benefits, education and health provision (Roberts 1960, Gosden 1961, Gilbert 1966, McCord 1976, Boyer 2004, Cordery 2003, Harris 2004).
With its corrosive impact on traditional forms of welfare and mutual aid rooted in place-bound community, the process of industrialization was from the outset traumatic and engendered responses at many different levels. As well as unions (the target of the Combination Acts), Friendly Societies and other self-help organizations, ordinary people caught up in the process participated in, or benefited from, mechanics institutes, literary societies, circulating libraries, youth’s guardian societies, temperance societies, medical charities, clothing societies, ‘benevolent and district visiting societies’, gardening clubs, brass bands and radical discussion groups (Morris 1983, p. 95). They also engaged in new forms of collectivism, such as the Chartist movement for political enfranchisement.
Providing patronage, leadership and financial support for many of these voluntary associations, the expanding professional and mercantile classes became heavily involved in what became an extensive and diverse charitable sector (Shapely 1998), with initiatives ranging from soup kitchens and garden allotment schemes, hospitals and temperance societies to large scale housing projects. Such patronage combined, often simultaneously, genuinely philanthropic motivations with a less altruistic agenda of social control (as with the many societies for the ‘suppression of begging’) and a self-seeking desire to acquire cultural and political capital by enhancing public reputation and esteem (Shapely 1998, after Bourdieu 1977). This was, of course, implicit in the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.
Alongside this growth in voluntarism, the local and national state struggled to find ways of managing both urban and rural poverty exacerbated by the fluctuations of the business cycle and the Napoleonic wars – notably with the Elizabethan poor laws being replaced temporarily by the Speenhamland system, which required parish landowners to make up wages to a minimum subsistence level, until this was abolished in 1834 leaving only a minimal safety net of the workhouses. It was not until after the 1860s in England, partly in response to state-led innovations such as obligatory social insurance under Bismark in Germany (Hennock 1987), that the British state began slowly to move away from the minimalist commitments of the classic liberal ‘nightwatch-man state’ (Nozick 2001). Throughout the nineteenth century, the expenditure and personnel of the voluntary sector outweighed those of central and local government combined. Local state expenditures, in turn, exceeded those of the centre (see Morris 1990, Daunton 1996).
All the while, intellectuals of many stripes were contributing a steady stream of proposals, both practicable and utopian, for securing the welfare and health of ordinary people caught up in the maelstrom of capitalist modernization. In addition to the vigorous critical analysis of capitalism associated with socialists and Marxists, radicals such as Owen and Fourier experimented with radical models for community living, whilst moderate philanthropist industrialists pioneered community level planning with model villages such as Port Sunlight (Lever) and Bournville (Cadbury).
In the late 18th century, both Spence (1775) and Paine (1797) had published proposals for a universal minimum income rooted in the radical commitment to common ownership of the land – a proposal repeated variously by Ogilvie (1782) and Dove (1850) and then pretty well every couple of decades right through the twentieth century. Proponents of a universal social dividend have included Milner (in the twenties), Cole (thirties), Rhys-Williams (forties), and several prominent members of the ‘Cambridge Circus’ of economists, including Robinson and Meade (eighties). At the turn of the twentieth century, Howard’s Garden Cities (1898/1902) proposal contained an overlooked but radical mechanism for a community-run, bottom-up welfare-state also paid for my land-rents, whilst George’s proposal (1879) for a ‘single tax’ re-asserted the contention of Paine and Spence that land be viewed as a unalienable commonwealth, with usage taxed accordingly and proceeds redistributed as a dividend.2
Similarly with regard to the democratic process, criticizing as ‘atomistic’ Morrison’s limited vision of accountability for public services through activist political parties and elected representatives, Cole argued for a more communitarian structure: that ‘[l]ocal government must rest on small and manageable cells of real neighbourhood organization...with a constant and real contact between members of the neighbourhood group and those who represent it on the larger civil authority’ (quoted in Daunton 1996, p. 204).
In short, in the century after Engels published his sensational account of the plight of the working class in Manchester (1844), Britain positively bubbled with social innovation at the level of self-help, self-organization within working class communities, in the burgeoning voluntary sector, and in the realm of ideas, with radical liberals, non-conformists, Owenite cooperativists and guild socialists generating an enormous variety of visions for the taming of the self-regulating market. Even the innovation of limited liability for joint stock companies, which epitomized the modernizing dynamic of liberal capitalism, was seen by many reformers as a form of democratization, opening the door for ordinary working-class men to become shareholders (Loftus 2002).
Out of this clamour of social experimentation, proposal and counter-proposal, there was very little to suggest that the top-down regulatory model of Beveridge and Keynes would be the inevitable and progressive endpoint of Polanyi’s double movement.3 Quite the opposite was the case. At least until 1926 (the year of the general strike), the ‘third way’ of Guild Socialism presented a serious ‘Associationalist’ alternative to the top-down, bureaucratic and centralizing version of social democracy which eventually came to hold sway in the Labour movement.4 Certainly it was the case that, as Harris (1992, p. 116) pointed out, a social analyst in late nineteenth century Britain would have expected the continuation of a pattern of social welfare that was ‘highly localised, amateur, voluntaristic and intimate in scale, by comparison with the more coercive and étatist schemes of her more continental neighbours.’ Social welfare in Britain was purveyed, to a greater extent, through face-to-face relationships. But such voluntarism notwithstanding, over subsequent decades, the British system evolved into one of ‘the most “rational” and bureaucratic of modern welfare states’ (ibid., 117). The implications of this in relation to current developments are explored below.
The Double Movement and ‘Varieties of Capitalism’
The myth of the self-regulating market insisted on, and ultimately depended upon, the unitary nature of capitalism. As Polanyi noted, ‘nothing less than a self-regulating market on a world scale could ensure the functioning of this stupendous mechanism’ (1944, p. 138). But as Dale has argued (2008, p. 499), in the absence of such an integrated global system, there were from the start deep tensions between the need for a competitive labour market, the gold standard and international free-trade – the three pillars of the Victorian liberal economy. Internationalizing free-trade in the context of the gold standard inevitably necessitated protective measures such as capital controls and import quotas, and the strains of the free market shifted to and fro between the spheres of politics and economics. The very protective measures required to ‘save society from the blind action of the market’ simultaneously aggravated trade slumps and the catastrophic swings of the business cycle (ibid., p. 500–501). In the end, these strains led everywhere to the rejection of laissez faire internationalism. Systematic state intervention emerged first of all during the war, as an emergency measure (Berend 2006). From the 1930s, intervention became ideological and programmatic, with a state socialist alternative to capitalist modernization in Russia, fascist corporatism in Nazi Germany and Italy and, elsewhere in Europe and the Anglophone democracies, social-democratic and liberal versions of a corporate social compact between capital and labour.
Different countries started at different times and took different routes to democracy, as capitalist modernization took very different forms (Moore 1966). Sequence had a great influence on such path-dependent routes, as successive countries played ‘catch up’ in response to the imperatives of national pride, economic self-interest and military security. Each case was characterised by a distinctive culture and inherited forms of ‘gemeinschaftlich’ social cohesion and non-market exchange. Patterns of solidarity within and between social classes and ethnic groups, cohesive we-identities and ‘imagined communities’ meshed in very different ways with the ‘gesellschaftlich’ space of national economies.
Together with the emergent patterns of Polanyi’s double-movement, these nationally specific deviations from the purity of the self-regulating market engendered, in the twentieth century, distinctive national ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Albert 1993, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars 1993, Aoki 2001, Hall and Soskice 2001, Hall 2007, Jackson and Deeg 2008). Institutional economists and economic sociologists have invested much time in the comparative analysis of different national models, and the extent to which they represent institutional arrangements which are, in principle, transferable. Although some have proved more durable and dynamic than others, the real lesson of the post-war period is that all such variety is vulnerable to the inherent restless nature of capitalism, dependent as it is on disruptive innovation and processes of ‘creative destruction’ (Metcalfe 2010). From a Polanyian perspective, any institutional barrier between politics and economics ends up with forms of protectionism, which undermine, and are undermined by, the intrinsic logic of global integration and expansion. The strains of the free market ‘shifting between politics and economics, national and international spheres’ (Dale 2008, p. 500–501) mean that success in terms of societal protection is likely to be temporary and provisional, as is the durability or distinctiveness of any national capitalism.
The Keynesian Welfare State and Embeddedness
As Dale (2010) showed with regard to the potential and significance of the Keynesian and corporatist forms of social democracy which emerged in post-war Europe, there are two rather different interpretations of Polanyi. The ‘hard’ Polanyi saw Keynesian welfarism as at best a stepping stone to a socialist mixed economy dominated by redistributive mechanisms (Lacher 2007). The ‘soft’ Polanyi saw the double-movement as a self-correcting mechanism which rectified the excesses of the self-regulating market, engendering a tamed market economy with an effective safety net and forms of governance, or a market economy ‘embedded in and sustained by a market society’ (Jessop and Sum 2006, p. 261 quoted in Dale 2010). As Dale argued, both interpretations are reasonable and reflect Polanyi’s differences in emphasis and changing mood in relation to seismic shifts in political context during the early-mid 20th century.5
Lacher (2007) argued that the social compact associated with Fordism and Keynesian welfarism cannot be seen as any significant process of disembedding, because the latter would surely imply a comprehensive decommodification of land, labour and money. In fact, as intuited by members of the Frankfurt School6 and demonstrated by Marxian analysts working within the framework of ‘regulation theory’ (Boyer 2002), Keynesian demand management and welfare systems provided an essential foundation for the emergence of consumer societies in the second half of the twentieth century. Consumerism was predicated very much on the cultural transformations associated with education and youth culture, the construction of nuclear households as units of consumption, the systematic erosion of the extended household as a sphere of production, and the entry of women into the labour market. In consequence, the apparent ‘decommodification’ through the provision of services such as childcare or health care underpinned the expansion of the market elsewhere (for instance by allowing mothers to work). Although undoubtedly progressive, such state interventions have involved the disembedding and rationalizing of services and functions which have often since been the subject of privatization and partially or wholly exposed to the market.
With respect to Polanyi’s integrating axes of redistribution, reciprocity, house-holding and exchange, one can envision a spectrum of paths which might be associated with the re-embedding of market activity, from pure top-down state redistribution at one end to familial mutualism and reciprocity at the other. However, the expansion of the social-democratic state:
undermined and reduced the sphere of reciprocity in the context of communities, extended families, and eventually nuclear families.
greatly expanded the circuits of redistribution in areas such as health, education and subsidized public transport.
serviced the enormous expansion of the market in adjacent spheres, and the encroachment of market relations and consumerism into previously insulated areas of the life-world such as family relationships, personal identity, security and happiness (the ‘widening and deepening of commodity relations which took place under the umbrella of ...embedded liberalism’ – Lacher 1999, p. 344).
To the extent that corporatist social democracy stabilized capitalism and laid down the framework for a long boom based on the emerging consumer society, Keynesian forms of redistribution serviced capitalist modernization.7 The associated forms of rationalization further undermined any residual gemeinschaftlich forms of community – communities characterized by strong affective ties between people, reproduced over time (history) and in relation to particular landscapes and ecologies (Aristotle’s koinonia, philia and antipeponthos – Polanyi 1968, Chapter 5).
Different societies have blended the integrating principles of reciprocity, redistribution, householding (autarchy) and exchange in to suit their context. At least in theoretical terms, the re-embedding of economic life might be achieved in different ways, by combining reciprocity and redistribution in different degrees. Not just Keynesian social democracy, but any socialist society oriented to continuous growth must, by definition, be weighted heavily in favour of redistribution. This is because growth implies the systematic accumulation which, in the absence of redistribution by a central authority, would quickly engender differentials in wealth and power incompatible with socialist egalitarianism. With regard to those welfare paths not taken, guild socialism, associationalism, distributivism and most varieties of anarchism imply movement much further in the direction of reciprocity (e.g. Kropotkin 1902) with more localised, face-to-face, gemeinschaftlich societal forms. From this perspective, English socialists in the tradition of Cole and Morris didn’t sufficiently reflect on the relationship between growth, modernization [progress] and gesellschaftlich social relations.
Finally, more reciprocative forms of re-embedding are probably only conceivable (though not necessarily desirable) in the context of ‘de-growth’ and the emergence of a more communitarian form of society on the back of a steady-state economy (Daly and Cobb 1990). Since 2008, perceived failures of mainstream sustainable development (particularly in relation to global climate change governance) combined with the economic crisis, have seen a renewed interest in the idea of limits to growth. Emerging in France, degrowth (‘decroissance’) has become an international social movement associated with Transition and relocalisation initiatives (Kallis 2011– see below). Any such scenario carries with it risks and trade-offs. De-growth is unlikely to be liberal or progressive in any straightforward way, and gemeinschaft might not be a place we want to live.
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