[자료] Towards a New Understanding of Economic Modernity

자료: 구글도서

제목 The economy as a polity: the political constitution of contemporary capitalism
저자 Christian Joerges, Bo Straith, Peter Wagner
편집자 Christian Joerges, Bo Straith, Peter Wagner
발행인 Routledge, 2005

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Introduction: The political constitution of contemporary capitalism

Peter Wagner

The debate about so-called economic globalisation has reached a new phase. For some time during the 1990s even critics had been convinced that neo-liberal thinking had achieved such a hegemony that nothing stood in the way of the further dismantling of all kinds of 'barriers to trade' and of the creation of an effective world-market for all commodities, including labour and capitel themselves. In the meantime, however, both the increased and increasingly effective resistance to the social consequences of neo-liberal market-makingㅡrising inequality and insecurity throughout the worldㅡand the visibly dysfunctional effects of lack of regulationㅡcurrency and stock market crashes, among othersㅡhave changed the politico-intellectual climate, even among economists and market-oriented policy-makers. It seems as if a new round in the debate about the respective roles of states and markets has been inaugurated. The story about 'the rise and fall of market society', which was first told in these terms by Karl Polanyi(...) 60 years ago, is about to receive a new chapter.

This book is itself a contribution to this new chapter. However, it insists that this chapter cannot be written by merely compiling its ingredients from the earlier episodes. It has long been recognised that there is, ever since market forces had been unleashed, a struggle between regulators and deregulators of economic activity.  Much intellectual energy has been devoted to trying to determine the appropriate boundary between the work of the market logic and the one of state intervention. The 'arguments for capitalism before its triumph' (Albert Hirshman(1977) ^The Passions and the Interests^) that were made in the 17th and 18th centuries optimistically suggested that the rise of commerce on its own would lead to a new and better society. It was hoped that the expansion of trade could enhance domestic and international peace as well as increase the wealth of nations. The rise of this kind of reasoning, however, coincided withㅡsimilarly Enlightenment-basedㅡthe rise of the call for popular sovereignty, for collective autonomy. From the Frech Revolution onwards, and increasingly from the middle of the 19th century onwards, it became clear that the workings of the market would increase social inequality and that the collective will, wherever it was permitted to express itself, requested measures to 'protect society'(Polanyi) from the dangers of the market. In the clash of these two principles, the idea arose that, unded democratic conditions, states would eternally be put against markets.

While broadly agreeing with this basic analysis, the contributors to this volume consider it to be insufficient to understand the interaction between these two 'logics'ㅡand this for two reasons: a theoretical and a historical one. First, the idea of opposed principles suggests that they are in equal measure potentially constitutive of social order. In contrast, we hold, with Polanyi, that markets cannot even be consistently thought of as self-regulating. Markets are always constituted by framework conditions that cannot be set by the market themselves. It was an error of much social and political theory, including critical theory, to accept the postulate of market self-regulation as a theoretical possibility. In contrast, one needs to think of 'market society', or capitalism, as always being politically constituted. The range and scope of market rules requires some agreement, or at least acceptance, for economic exchange to be working at all; in democratic societies, therefore, these rules are, at least theoretically, always subject to political debate and decision. To put the issue in theoretical terms: even the most pure version of economic liberalism always entails at the same time a political philosophy. This volume thus proposes to understand contemporary capitalism by regarding the economy as a polity, as an arrangement that is always constituted by some collective agreements about its mode of operation.

Such insight clearly was present in all major contributions to the analysis of capitalismㅡfrom Adam Smith's wealth of nations to Karl Marx's critique of political economy to Max Weber's protestant ethic to Karl Polanyi's great transformation, to mark only the most crucial steps. However, it is not only this insight that seems to have been largely forgotten. There also appears to be some need more clearly to spell out the ways in which the economy can fruitfully be analyzed as a polity, as politically constituted. For this reason, the first part of this volume is devoted to a retrieval of the theoretical resources that are available to us for the analysis of capitalism and to the elaboration of a novel view on that basis. Setting the tone for the volume, Chapter 1ㅡby Fred Blockㅡdraws its inspiration from Karl Polanyi but develops further Polanyi's theory of the fictitious commodities for the analysis of the contemporary constellation of capitalism. Polanyi had underlined in general that market society tended to consider commodities as 'goods' that had not been providied by market action, and he singled out land, labour and money as those three fictitious commodities. In his analysis of the fall of market society, he emphasized the latter two: the movement for the protection of labour had transformed market society from the late 19th century onwards; and, under the conditions of democratic mass society in the early 20th century, the rigid mechanism of the gold standard for the regulation of international finance turned out to be the main element in the collapse of the 19th century order. Block adds knowledge and competition to the list of fictitious commodities and shows how contemporary capitalism is, for the provision of those goods, dependent on means that it cannot itself provide.

In his later anthropological writings, Polanyi broadened his perspective on the embeddedness of economy, and it is to this cultural or civilisational approach to the analysis of capitalism that Johann Arnason turns in Chapter 2. Civilisational approaches to capitalism challenge the notion that capitalism is a self-contained economic system or a functioning machine(Fernand Braudel) by thematising the cultural and political premises of capitalism as an economic regimeㅡor, to put it another way, the undrlying constellations of meaning and power. Arnason's analysis pays particular attention to the recent revival of interest in the concept of 'spirit of capitalism', made famous by Weber, but already used by Werner Sombart, by distinguishing three approaches:

• the 'new spirit of capitalism (Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello); 
• nationalism as the cultural force behind capitalist development (Liah Greenfeld); 
• and capitalism as a religion (Christoph Deutschmann).

The civilisation frame of reference is being developed in a situation where the more specific and established versions of the critique of capitalism seem inadequate. Chapter 3ㅡby Peter Wagnerㅡis precisely devoted to a review of the tradition of critical theory. Selecting Theodore W. Adorno's work as a key example, the chapter shows how the place of political philosophy was evacuated in critical theory in favour of a reasoning that emphasised epistemic obstacles towards analysing capitalism instead. From such an angle, then, any embedding of critical theory emerged forcefully. Not content with this finding, however, the chapter in a second step proceeds to demonstrate that the dimension of political philosophy in the critical analysis of capitalism can be restored. If Adorno and other critical theorists are read in this light, their observations on developmental tendencies of capitalism gain new meaning, and provide insights that cannot be found, for instance, in current debates about 'varieties of capitalism'.

The work at theoretical retrieval in the first part of the volume is not meant to lead towards the comprehensive theory that will, once and for all, explain the workings of capitalism. Indeed, all three authors underline that the historical experiences with capitalism lead to transformations that in turn will require new angle of analysis. It is in the nature of the struggles over the embedding of markets that their outcomes are subject to historical contingencies and cannot be completely known beforehand. Beyond a review of the theoretical toos at hand, therefore, the analysis of the contemporary constellation thus also requires an understanding of the recent transformations of capitalism. The second part of the volume is devoted to this task.

This second part is orgainised along two lines. Three chapters are devoted to analyses of the current state of regulation of the two fictitious commodities that were central to Polanyi: labour and money (Chapter 4, 5, and 6). Three further chapters deal with the historical development and novel forms of the mode of embedding markets (Chapter 7, 8, and 9).

Writing during the Second World War, Polanyi had concluded that the protection of labour had indeed been rather successfully accomplished, but that this achievement had at the same time indirectly led to the collapse of the international monetary order and to the domestic endangerment of liberty through the rise of fascism. At the end of that war, fascism was defeated and the reconstruction effort was devoted to the rebuilding of a world trade order on the basis of a new international monetary regime and to the maintenance of the protective shield for labour by extending national welfare state measures. In Chapter 4, Bo Strasth reconstructs the long-term history of international monetary regulation and demonstrates how the forms of embedding markets through the provision of money have changed historically with the alternating fate of world trade and with the increasing degree of dependence of national policy-making on the electorate under the conditions of universal suffrage. (서문의 13쪽 끝)

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By 1960, there was broad agreement about the democratic state of law being the site of public action, and about policy-making and policy implementation as law-based public administration, instructed by theories of hierarchy and bureaucracy, being the form of public action. From the 1970s onwards, however, 'implementation problems' moved into the centre of attention of policy analysts, and the failure of the Keynes-inspired growth policies of the first Mitterand government in France during the early 1980s suggested strongly that national economies could no longer be managed by national policies alone. Against this backgroud, Chapter 7ㅡby Peter Lindsethㅡoffers a comparative history of the embeddedness of publiv administrattion itself; Chapter 8ㅡby Pepper Culpepperㅡanalyses the emergence of novel forms of politico-economic co-ordination 'below' the national level; and Chapter 9ㅡby Christian Joeges and Michelle Eversonㅡfocuses on 'governance' as a mode of co-ordination 'above' the national level in the European Union.

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Part 1. The Analysis of Capitalism: Work at the Theoretical Retrieval

Chapter 1. Towards a New Understanding of Economic Modernity

Fred Block

"Too often the writings of ... Polanyi have been ravaged like the carcasses of dead bodiesㅡthe most useful parts ripped from their meaning-giving integument and transpanted into ailing theories. (Michael Burawoy 2003)[주1]

This chapter argues that a reconstruction of Karl Polanyi's social theory can provide contemporary scholars with powerful tools for analysing the last two centuries of capitalist development and for understanding the prospects and possibilites in the current historical moment. Polanyi is similar to his two great predecessorsㅡKarl Marx and Max Weberㅡin that his writings do not yield their secrests early for a range of different reasons. All three bodies of work are marked by internal theoretical tensions, shifting positions over time, and the absence of a final synthetic statement(Block 2001 and 2003; Block and Somers 2003). Moreover, our readings of all of these figures are encrusted with sedimentary layers of earlier interpretations and misinterpretations that make it difficult to recapture the 'meaning-giving integument'.

The goal here is not to provide a definitive interpretation of Polanyi's writings, but to elaborate a set of Polanyi-inspired concepts that provide leverage for the analysis of contemporary market societies. Developing such concepts is an urgent task because the critique of capitalism has reached an impasse in recent years. Other chapters in this volume, particulary by Wagner and Arnason, provide rich accounts of the analytic difficulties and intellectual dead ends that have plagued theories of capitalism. From the Enlightenment onwards, there has been a deep conflict between the project of political modernity defined as collective self-determination and economic modernity defined as the autonomous determination of the ways in which human needs are satisfied. Polanyi is one of the few thinkers who allows us to envision how this fundamental conflict could be overcome.

1.1. The Double Movement

Polanyi's masterpiece, The Great Transformation, was written between 1941 and 1943ㅡthe same period in which JM Keynes and Harry Dexter White were working on post-war international monetary plans (Andrews, in this volume). Polanyi was also hoping to influence the post-war settlement; he wanted to avert the disastrous restoration of the Gold Standard that had occurred after the First World War. He believed that Gold Standard restoration had occurred then because policy-makers across political spectrum failed to understand the deep flaws in market liberalismㅡthe idea that society should be organised around an integrated set of self-regulating markets for commodities, land, labor and money. Polanyi's core project was to show that market liberalism was utopian, impractical, and produced horrendous unintendted consequences.

Polanyi's book begins with the audacious claim that the Second World War was caused by the peculiar economic theory elaborated in England by Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo in the period from 1798 to 1817. These two architects of Classical Economics provided the theoretical justification for organising society around self-regulating markets. As England became the dominant global power over the course of the 19th century, Malthus's and Ricardo's theoretical system provided the blueprint for organising the global economy around free trade and the Gold Standard. In Polanyi's view, entrusting either national economies or the global economy to market self-regulation was internally contradictory and unsustainable. The crisis-prone project of organising a self-regulating global economy finally resulted in its collapse in 1930s. That collapse, in turn, brought fascism to power in several countries and made a Second World War inevitable.

To flesh out his analysis, Polanyi argued that European societies in the 19th century were marked by a double movement of conflicting pushes and pulls. On the one side, inspired by Malthus and Ricardo, was the movement of laissez-faireㅡthe effort to eliminate barriers to the growth and integration of markets. This movement was given powerful intellectual legitimation by Classical Economists' vision of self-regulating markets automatically establishing equilibrium between supply and demand. It was under the banner of this movement that the New Poor Law was passed in England in 1834 to create a national labour market in which wages would be the only source of income for prime age workers other than incarceration in a workhouse (Block and Somers 2003). The movement went on to abolish the Corn Law i 1846 and to campaign for international free trade and global adoption of the Glod Standard.

Almost immediately, however, a counter-movement began to form. The purpose of this second movement was to protect society from the expansion of markets. However, in contrast to the first movement, this counter-movement lacked a unified theory; it was driven instead by the practical need of different groups to place limits on markets. One of its first victories was the passage of the Factory Acts in the 1840s to place some restraints on the exploitation of workers in the Satanic Mills of early industrial England. At the same time, the Chartist agitation by an emergent working class opened up a second front of this counter-movement.(4쪽의 끝)

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(...) economy' (Block 2003). The key idea is that there is no such thing as a disembedded and fully autonomous economy; all market economies are constrained and shaped by non-market institutions and non-market values. This builds on two key Polanyian insights. First, the creation of market economies is always an internally contradictory policy; it cannot do without the state. Secondly, without the assistance of the protective counter-movement, societies built around the free market vision would self-destruct. Their only opportunity to be viable depends upon a broad range of social practices designed to constrain and limit the play of market forces. This includes widespread adherence to values or orientations that are in deep conflict with the values of the marketplace (see Arnason, in this volume).

To be sure, market societies experience disemdedding projectsㅡsystematic efforts to dismantle existing limits on market forces. The effort to create a common European market can be understood as involving such a disembedding project (see Joerges and Everson, Bronzini and Strath, in this volume). However, there are still no disembedded economies; the disembedding projects are combined with re-rembedding projects (Vogel 1996). In some cases, such as European fascism or Pinochet's Chile, the 'freeing' of the market occurs simultaneously wih a systematic expansion of the state's repressive role. In other instances, disembedding projects are combined with the development of new institutions of social protection or the shift of protectionist measures from one scale of governance to another. There is no guarantee, of course, that these new protections will emerge automatically or will be as effective as those they replace. However, the inherent instability of markets means that disembedding projects will always provide opportunities for new forms of social protection.

1.2.(1.3?) Scales of Governance

Polanyi's framework for analysing market societies was explit in recognising five distinct levels of action. The first level of action is the mobilisation of social actors as part of these two great conflicting movements for laissez-faire and social protection. These efforts tend to begin in local contestations that often make claims on local or sub-national statesㅡthe second level of action. However, as tensions intensify, demands often come to be focused on the decisions and policies of national statesㅡthe third level of action. The movements fight, for example, for and against tariff protections, new regulatory initiatives, or new forms of social insurance. Actions by national states are sometimes further constrained by regional blocs or multi-national empiresㅡa fourth level of action. Having spent his formative years in Hungary which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Polanyi was acutely aware that ethnicity, nationhood, boundaries, and sovereignty often do not coincide. Finally, all of these entities operate in a global environment that often constrains and limits the actions that can be taken at lower levels. Starting after 1870, when English hegemony established the combined imperatives of free trade and adherence to the Gold Standard, there has been the beginning of a global polity that establishes rules that it is costly to defy.

For Polanyi, the existence and coercive pressure of this global scale of governance is a variable that depends on shifts in the global balance of power and the relative stability of the global economy. Hence, in the 1920s when there was an international consensus for the restoration of Gold Standard, the global rules meant that national governments were forced to resist the powerful pressures of the movement for social protection both inside and outside of the legislatures. In the 1930s, however, governments gained greater policy autonomy as the gloval governance mechanismms lost legitimation, enforcement mechanisms, and the institutional support of powerful governments.

This part of Polanyi's argument anticipates the contrast between the post-Second World War era of 'embedded liberalism' from 1945 to 1973 and the period of reascendant market liberalism from 1983 onward (Ruggie 1982; Stiglitz 2002; see also Strath and Culpepper, in this volume). In the 'embedded liberalism' period, the global regime afforded governments of developed nations considerable policy autonomy which made possible the successful pursuit of 'full employment' as a policy goal and allowed the full flowering of social welfare spending (Esping-Anderson 1990; Hicks 1999). While poorer nations had considerably less scope to protect their populations from the ups and downs of the business cycle, there was still tolerance for a range of government initiatives to foster economic development.

However, all of this changed dramatically in the period of reascendant market liberalism after 1983 (Blyth 2002; Scharpf 1991). The pressure of the global regime placed increasingly restrictive limits on policy cutonomy for both developed and developing nations. Governments no longer had the option to pursue 'full employment'; they were forced to tolerate unemployment in order to avoid inflation, government budget deficits, and speculative assaults on their currencies. The upward trend in welfare states were forced to place limits on future spending increases. Most developing and transitional nations were pressured to abandon a range of active government development policies and to pursue instead privitisation, deregulation, and limits on government spending (Friedman 1999; Kay 2003; Stiglitz 2002).

However, in analysing the sea change between these two periods, it is easy to overdraw the contrast.  While governmental policy autonomy declined considerably, it hardly disappeared(Mosely 2003). As in Polanyi's description of the workings of the 19th century Gold Standard, people and governments still found numerous 'under the radar' methods to provide protection against the tides of global forces. (...)

1.3(1.4?) Fictitious Commodities and the Co-ordination Problem

The great strength of Polanyi's analysis is that he demonstrates concretely why markets cannot be self-regulating and why they must be socially, politically, and ideationally embedded. He does this through this distinction between fictitious commodities and true commoditiesㅡthose things that are produced for sale on a market. Polanyi argues that human labour power, land, and the supply of money must be understood as fictitious commodities because they were not produced to be sold. However, the theory of a self-regulating market system requires that society pretends that these fictitious commodities will behave like other commodities where the price mechanism produces a rapid balancing of supply and demand. When the price of a true commodity rises, producers have a strong incentive to increase the supply and consumers have good reason to shift to other products, and the reverse happens when price fall. However, with fictitious commodities, supply side adjustments are likely to be very limited, so the speed with which supply and demand are balanced is greatly diminished. To make matters worse, disequilibrium between supply and demand for these particular economic inputs create acute difficulties for the functioning of economy and society.

In the case of labour, insufficient demand produces unemployment and a potential threat to social order when the unemployed have no other way to feed their families. Insufficient supply of labour also can be disruptive because it increases the relative bargaining power of employees who might well want to challenge the existing distributional rules. With land, the key problems are boom and bust in land markets, environmental degradation, and whether farming will remain viable as compared to other types of land use. In the case of money, a sustained shortfall in the money supply tends to be deflationary while too rapid an expansion tends to produce inflation.

Polanyi uses the fictitious commodity concept to identify three key coordination problems that cannot be solved by markets operating on their own. Every market socieity has to develop some set of institutional arrangements to manange there fictitious commodities. Labour unions, unemployment insurance and other welfare policies, education and training programmes, policies to encourage or discourage immigration and emigration, and in some places, centralised systems of wage bargaining have been part of the standard repertoire for co-ordinating supply and demand in labour market. In the case of land, co-ordination involves zoning laws, environmental regulations, and a broad set of policies designed to protect agricultural producers from both market and weather related contingencies. In the case of money, the key co-ordinating role is played by central banks and regulatory agencies that oversee financial institutions.

Polanyi's framework can be expanded by adding two additional co-ordination problems that require institutional solutions. The first of these is yet another fictitious commodityㅡknowledgeㅡa category that includes both systematic research produced by scientists and scholars as well as the more concrete results of 'learning by doing' within organisations(Jessop 2001). There are some forms of (8쪽의 끝...)

1.3(1.4?) The Varieties of Capitalism and the Obstacles to Convergence

The argument is that each market society must develop a complex system of institutions to solve the co-ordination problems posed by the fictitious commodities and the need to sustain market competition. This institutional complexity makes it unlikely that market societies would converge towards one institutional form. In fact, many of the scholars who have developed the 'varieties of capitalism' perspective (Crouch and Streecj 1997; Hall and Soskice 2001; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997) have been explicit in drawing on Polanyi for inspiration in developing their ideas. However, there are two distinct ways in which Polanyi's analyses diverge from views that are widely held among contemporary analyses of capitalist variation.

First, the influential analysis developed by Hall and Soskice(2001) draws a constrast between Liberal Market Economies(LMEs) and Co-ordinated Market Economies(CMEs) by starting at the level of the business firm. They argue that firms face five basic co-ordination problemsㅡindustrial relations vocational training and education, corporative governance, interfirm relations and relations with their own employees. In constructing their ideal types, they argue that in LMEs, firms characteristically handle these problems through hierarchy and competitive market relations, while in CMEs firms are much more likely to use non-market arrangements to solve these co-ordination problems. This argument is an effort to synthesise earlier work that has highlighted the constrast between the Anglo-American model and European varieties of capitalism in the organisation of corporate finance, labour relations, and social welfare.

However, there are several significant difficulties with this formulation. it ignores the more macro-economic forms of co-ordination that occur across all varieties of capitalism, particularly the management of the fictitious commodities of labour and money. Moreover, it also ignores the substabtial role that governments play in structuring particular industries. In both LMEs and CMEs, the government is integrally involved in regulating and shaping such industries as telecommunications, finance, transportations, enery, arms production, health care and housing, which cumulatively represent a substantial share of GDP.

(...)

A second and separate issue in the 'varieties of capitalism' literature has been a tendency by some analysts to anticipate that market societies would converge towards the Anglo-American variety. This argument was developed most systematically by John Gray whose 1988 book ^False Dawn^, was a powerful polemic against market liberalism. Gray, a former Thatcherite, drew heavily on the arguments of Karl Polanyi to point to the enormous dangers involved in the United States's effort to reorganise the global economy on a free market basis. One (... 11쪽의 끝)

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1.4(1.5?) The Hidden History of Modernity

The major theories of modernityㅡincluding market liberalism and Marxismㅡhave agreed that there is a deep conflict between economic modernity and political modernity. Market liberals have always feared that democratic self-government would interfere with the necessary autonomy required for market economies to function. Contemporary thinkers in this tradition continue to search for institutional mechanisms such as independent central banks and budgetary pacts that put a wall between the market economy and democratic politics. Public choice theorists have elaborated a rich critique of how democratically elected politicians compete to extract rents from productive activities that are then used to finance redistributive measures intended to solidify electoral support from the beneficiaries.

Parallel arguments have been developed by Marxists and other critics of capitalism. 'Bourgeois democracy' has been seen as unable to achieve the Enlightenment ideal of self-government precisely because of the institutional separation between politics and markets. (...)