Abstract
Zelizer’s work may be read as an attack on the central Polanyian thesis: that the market system threatens social life by the undue prominence it lends the economy in the organization of modern society. The recent publication of Viviana Zelizer’s The Purchase of Intimacy (2005a) is therefore an excellent opportunity to review the general trend of her work Zelizer 1979, 1985, 1994, and contrast her leading ideas to the central thesis that gives Polanyi’s work its particular flavor: the danger encapsulated in the use of modern money and the functioning of the market system.
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Notes
A good example of this intellectual strategy can be found in Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy’s paper, where they construct a typology from Albert Hirschman’s study of the political justification of capitalism. Polanyi’s approach belongs to the “destructive markets and commodified nightmare”, contrasting with the “liberal dream of civilizing markets”; Zelizer’s approach is part of the “feeble markets” thesis according to which “the problem of moral order remains relevant, but as an independent rather than dependent variable” (Fourcade and Healy 2007: 295).
This issue is dealt with in Simmel’s book, when he considers how an ascetic man regards money. Here, the difficulty arises from the fact that money can, at any period of time, and especially at a time of moral weakness, recover its full potentiality; this explains, according to Simmel, the fact that the ascetic man will reject money, and hate it as well (Simmel 1900: 304).
Scholars concerned with network analysis have developed their views according to a duality that is central to Polanyi’s "double movement" approach (Baum 1996: chapter 1): embeddedness/disembeddedness (Granovetter 1995), coupling/decoupling (White 1990). This duality is missing in Zelizer’s approach since disearmarking is never raised.
“4. Monetary concerns are seen as constantly enlarging, quantifying, and often corrupting all areas of life. As an abstract medium of exchange, money has not only the freedom but also the power to draw an increasing number of goods and services into the web of the market. Money is thus the vehicle for an inevitable commodification of society. 5. There is no question about the power of money to transform nonpecuniary values, whereas the reciprocal transformation of money by values or social relations is seldom conceptualized or else explicitly rejected” (Zelizer 1994: 12).
“5. ... the alleged freedom and unchecked power of money become improbable. Cultural and social structures set inevitable limits to the monetization process by introducing profound controls and restrictions on the flow and liquidity of money” (Zelizer 1994: 19).
“All these payments [allowances, fees, bribes, tips, repayments, charity, occasional gifts], and more, commonly occur in the company of intimate transactions, take their meanings from the longer-term social ties within which those transactions occur, and vary in consequences as a function of these longer-term ties” (Zelizer 2005a: 27). This is what is called “Zelizer’s circuits” or “circuits of commerce” (Zelizer 2005b: 293).
“What are the practical implications of such an approach? To direct our search toward just, non-coercitive sets of economic transactions for different types of intimate relations. The goal is not therefore to cleanse intimacy from economic concerns: the challenge is to create fair mixture” (Zelizer 2005a: 298). Zelizer adds that market relations may produce injustice and may corrupt intimate relations; however, the authors that she is commenting upon in chapter 2 of her book and whom she regards as co-authors (Zelizer 2005a: 92) limit themselves by demanding that market transactions be grounded upon the free will of the people involved (Zelizer 2005a: 85, 88).
See also the unusual but provocative views offered in Keith Hart’s book (2000), who suggests linking the informational power of the internet to monetary transactions so that more democracy can be brought to the monetarized regime of modern society.
This can be illustrated by the documents and the comments displayed on the website of the authors of Freakonomics: www.freakonomics.com/times070906.html (last access January 2007).
Zelizer’s account of a same sex couple in which one woman died during 9/11 can be read as a perfect example of such a situation. In the lawsuit against the brother of the victim, the surviving woman was able to prove her intimate relation with her deceased friend thanks to their joint bank account, insurance policies, etc. (Zelizer 2005a: 10-11).
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A draft of this essay was presented in March 2007 at a workshop held at the University of London, and a preliminary French version has appeared in a special issue of the Revue du Mauss devoted to Polanyi’s thought (Vol. 29, June 2007). The present version is directed to Zelizer’s views on the relation between market and society. I thank Franck Cochoy, Keith Hart, José Ossandon, and Viviana Zelizer for their helpful comments and advices.
Appendix
Appendix
Classical sociologists in contemporary economic sociology
(Distribution of references [in percent])
| Weber | Marx | Durkheim | Polanyi | Schumpeter | Parsons | Veblen | Simmel | Pareto |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Swedberg 1987 | 25 | 12 | 12 | 8 | 13 | 12 | 5 | 6 | 6 |
Swedberg 2003 | 51 | 10 | 6 | 5 | 9 | 7 | 2 | 6 | 2 |
Smelser and Swedberg 1994 | 28 | 9 | 8 | 14 | 11 | 14 | 9 | 9 | 1 |
Smelser and Swedberg 2004 | 37 | 13 | 14 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
Dobbin 2004 | 44 | 19 | 19 | 9 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 6 | 0 |
Lévesque et al. 2001 | 16 | 19 | 14 | 26 | 9 | 5 | 10 | 1 | 0 |
Steiner 1999 | 33 | 10 | 14 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 10 | 7 | 17 |
Trigilia 1998 | 29 | 17 | 11 | 11 | 11 | 5 | 8 | 5 | 2 |
N= | 359 | 158 | 127 | 124 | 114 | 85 | 76 | 61 | 37 |
Out of eight books that offer a general presentation of economic sociology, I have counted the number of quotations made to nine classical sociologists so that I might form a general picture of the authors to whom this field is related. Weber is definitively the most often quoted author: in seven cases, he was ranked first in the citation patterns. Marx, Durkheim, Polanyi, and to a lesser extent Schumpeter (in one case no reference was made to him) share a somewhat similar position and provide a large number of references. Note that Polanyi is ranked first in the citation pattern of a book written from the point of view of économie sociale (Lévesque et al. 2001) Parsons, Veblen, and Simmel are of secondary importance, and Pareto’s contribution to the field is almost completely forgotten.
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Steiner, P. Who is right about the modern economy: Polanyi, Zelizer, or both?. Theor Soc 38, 97–110 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9072-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9072-2