(1) Introduction, by Kenneth McRobbie
I would like to share with members of the Karl Polanyi Institute, the correspondence I initiated in The Times Literary Supplement, following a review by Raymond Tallis ("Dreamers of paradise", TLS, August 16, 2002) of Roger Sandall's The Culture Cult. Designer tribalism and other essays (Oxford: Westview, 2002). In the course of his very favourable review of what he termed this "brilliant, impassioned and sardonic" book, Tallis unfortunately accepted at face value the author's tendentious comments on Polanyi's Dahomey.

Sandall's book is a hard-hitting critique of the worst aspects of cultural relativism, and of those allegedly "disgruntled" western intellectuals -- among whom he lumps Karl Polanyi -- who produce sentimental assessments of primitive cultures. Thus, Tallis writes: "Among the many who believed the answer to the problems of the twentieth century were to be found in tribal societies of the past, the palm for lunacy must be awarded to the highly respected economic historian Karl Polanyi. He was so impressed by the control and command economy imposed by the rulers of eighteenth-century Dahomey (now called Benin) that he commended this barbaric autocracy as a model for the twentieth century. He did not worry too much about the rights of the king's 2,000 wives, or of the large numbers of women appointed by the king to provide sexual services for the public at large, the elaborate system of state spies, or the systematic slaughter of prisoners of war".

(2) My letter responding to this review was published on November 22, 2002.
THE REAL DAHOMEY OF KARL POLANYI
Sir, -- In his review of Roger Sandall's The Culture Cult (TLS Aug.16) Raymond Tallis declares that the economic historian Karl Polanyi, though "highly respected", must be awarded "the palm for lunacy" on the subject of Dahomey. But a reading of his Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966), will show that it is far from being, as Tallis charges, a "model for the twentieth century", a recommendation for "the command and control economy". On the contrary, Polanyi explicitly states early on that for us "the vital imperatives [are] physical survival, freedom, and a morally meaningful existence".

These have been threatened, he stated in his widely translated The Great Transformation, the political and economic origins of our time (1944), by the market system's subordinating of society to the economy, adding in Dahomey that in western society, "having absolutized the principle of profit, man had lost the capacity of subordinating it again". In the latter, Polanyi issued two warnings: first, against the "ethnocentric bias that so easily takes hold of us on economic subjects [reciprocity (and mutual aid), redistribution, and householding] that arise outside of our own Western culture"; second, against "idealizing backward worlds". (xxii)

Polanyi "did not worry too much", according to Tallis, about violence, spying and the status of women in Dahomey. Isn't it enough that he tellingly records "endemic techniques of treachery" and "repulsive cruelty", "suicidal wars of revenge" and sacrifices "to maintain discipline through terror", the "long-term spying activities", the ancestor worship which, diverting "an enormous sum" from consumption, represented an "excoriation of the economy"? As for the complex state role of women, Polanyi tentatively suggests that it stemmed from "a mental attitude that transcended considerations of practical efficiency". (56)

Far from advocating any model, Karl Polanyi criticized all modellers and their blind adherence, whether to command communism or the liberal free market system. Essential to the striving for freedom, which he believed must always occupy us, is the need for "a wider knowledge of strategies of institution-building in the face of varied challenges", "in the conviction that a realistic view of great socioeconomic changes, wherever and whenever enacted, broadens our horizon and advances the search for solutions". (xv-xvi)

KENNETH McROBBIE
The Karl Polanyi Institute, Concordia University. Montréal.

(3) In response to the above, the following letter -- from the author, not the reviewer -- was published on December 20, 2002.
KARL POLANYI AND DAHOMEY
Sir, -- Karl Polanyi does indeed say that we should "beware of idealizing backward worlds" (Kenneth McRobbie, Letters, November 26). But how can McRobbie not have noticed that, after this disingenuous disclaimer, Polanyi does exactly that on page after page of his book about West Africa?

Relentlessly driven by his "sacred hate" of market economics (his wife's phrase, by the way), Polanyi would actually have us believe that his account of the slave-owning, war-making and bloodthirsty eighteenth-century tribal kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) was something from which we all have much to learn -- in his own words, as contributing to "meeting the problems" of the age. In contrast to the impression McRobbie would like to give, Polanyi does not just "tellingly record" with disapproving sorrow and regret the "repulsive cruelty" of Dahomey: the passage where this statement occurs also attempts to excuse and justify such horrors on the grounds that such practices ensured "an unbreakable society, held together by bonds of solidarity over which only naked force eventually pevailed".

It is nonsense to say that Polanyi criticized command Communism and free markets impartially. As elsewhere, Polanyi's purpose in his 1966 Dahomey and the Slave Trade was to advocate an alternative to the market system in which prices were state-administered and not set by supply and demand. That is what he found embodied in Dahomey's "ports of trade". He was given to asserting that the essentials of today's market organization were "an ephemeral interplay of modern Western cultural traits" with no history before the nineteenth century, and spent years ransacking the ancient world for evidence of the absence of markets and the presence of state economic controls. His claims regarding Greece were too much for Hayek, who said that while mercantilist and colonial endeavours were plainly sponsored by the Athernian state, "it is absurd to conclude from this, as some modern writers have done [Polanyi 1945, 1977], that, at the time of Athens's greatest prosperity and growth, its trade was 'administered', regulated by government through treaties and conducted at fixed prices". (The Fatal Conceit, p 44. A thoroughgoing refutation of Polanyi's arguments can be found in Morris Silvers, "Karl Polanyi and Markets in the Ancient Near East: The challenge of the evidence", Journal of Economic History, Vol.XLIII, no.4, December 1983.)

"Freedom" is a word Polanyi tosses about quite a bit, though what it means is hard to say, since he appears to think it entirely appropriate for the state of Dahomey to regulate even the number of garden hoes. As to women, and the fact that the king had about 2,000 attached to the court for his personal delectation, I am not sure what McRobbie can mean by telling us that this stemmed from "a mental attitude that transcended considerations of practical efficiency". Sounds like euphemistic mush to me.

ROGER SANDALL
98 Hall Street, Bondi Beach, Sydney.

(4) My response to the above was published on March 21, 2003.
THE REAL KARL POLANYI
Sir, -- The reviewer of Roger Sandall's book The Culture Cult was well advised to let the author try (Letters, December 20, 2002) to justify his curious views of Karl Polanyi. But unfortunately, his polemical letter shows that he is still under the misapprehension that Polanyi advocated an eighteenth-century West African slave state as a model for the modern West.

Sandall now reveals that he regards Polanyi as an opponent of capitalism in all its forms and a proponent of state Communism -- a bizarre charge, in view of his anti-Soviet literary anthology on the Hungarian Revolution (The Plough and the Pen, 1963, with a Foreword by W.H.Auden), and the fact that his widely translated principal work was not published in the then "Communist" countries. This, The Great Transformation (1944) by "the great Hungarian economist" (Newsweek, January 6, 2003), was listed among the "Great Books" (Time, 1977), and "the hundred most influential books since the war" (TLS, 1995), and has recently appeared in a new edition.

Sandall misquotes Polanyi's wife, who actually said: "It is given to the best among men somewhere to let down the roots of a sacred hatred". For Polanyi, this occurred on first coming to the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in 1934; nothing he had read in Budapest or Vienna prepared him for the degradation of much of British working-class life which he experienced on his travels as a WEA and Extramural lecturer.

Thereafter Polanyi rejected the economistic reductionism which, ignoring "Adam Smith's humanistic grounds", claimed to represent "the West". His thesis was, and remains, that "the idea of a self-adjusting market implies a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society". (GT, p3) Writing during the war, he far-sightedly opposed uncritical reliance "on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth".

Equally presciently, disturbed by the "signs of barrenness of the Cultural West in its encounters with the world at large", Polanyi conceived his "New West" Project (1958) based primarily upon the work of the century's great writers (including, for the record, Koestler, Orwell, Pasternak, Rilke, and Silone). He stated his priorities: "The subordination of science and technology, as well as economic organization, to our will to human progress and to the fulfilment of personality, has become a requirement of survival".

Now, when institutions are crumbling amid the need to re-allocate powers and responsibilities is recognized, Polanyi's research on the institutional innovativeness of other societies under pressure can only broaden our view of the range of possible creative human responses.

KENNETH McROBBIE
The Karl Polanyi Institute, Concordia University, Montréal.