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초기제국에 있어서의 교역과 시장 - 대우학술총서 번역 70
칼 폴라니 지음 / 민음사 / 1994년 6월
평점 :
절판
폴라니의 거대한 변환을 읽은 사람이면 일독을 권할만 하다. 거대한 변환이 지금의 자본주의의 초기역사를 근거로 시장과 사회의 이분법을 제시하면서 주류경제학의 자유시장론을 공격했다면 이책은 경제학에서 말하는 시장은 인류역사에서 비교적 최근의 발명이란 것을 보여주는 것으로 공격을 심화한다. 고대 메소포타미아와 이집트문명에서 무역은 있었지만 시장은 없었다는 것을 증명하는 것으로서 정치가 먼저 있었고 시장은 그후에 만들어진것이란 것을 보여주면서 시장은 자연적 상태가 아니라는 것을 보여준다.
다음은 내가 아마존에 썼던 리뷰이다.
This was edited by Karl Polanyi not Arensberg Polanyi. The book info on this site is not correct.
Anyway, Since the neoliberalism seizes the time, Polanyi revives from the sea of oblivion. His masterpiece, ¡®The Great Transformation¡¯ is, in essence, a critic of liberalism which was the Zeitgeist of the 19th century, as I mentioned in a review of the book. Not surprisingly he was mobilized as a weapon to attack neoliberalism which could develop into the Zeitgeist of globalization. Polanyi questioned the very nature of the market, and concluded it¡¯s not the law of nature. This book is the endeavor to provide the evidence to his proposition. He argues that trade was not practice through market in early empires before Aristotle¡¯s Greece, at least in the West and Middle East, Maya, and so forth. At that time, resources were allocated through not the market but the system of reciprocity and redistribution. Early Egypt and other early empires were the system of power to allocate resources on the principles of reciprocity and redistribution. In this vein, the politics was also the economics. The trade was not the business of merchant but the business of the state: it was between states. Trade happened when some state couldn¡¯t defeat other state with military forces. The point coincides with recent mainstream theories of the state like Tilly¡¯s or Giddens¡¯: at the root of the state lies not the contract among equal individuals as Rousseau maintained but the violence that seeks the rents like trophy. This point is supported by the fact that before capitalist market emerged, most traded items were, in its nature, the luxury consumed by ruling class. The market merged around the time of Aristotle. So, Polanyi argues, it¡¯s no wonder and reasonable that Aristotle didn¡¯t understand the system of market and saw it as the evil thing to social order.