Now I think I understand you Cosma.

I don’t think so. I think that what is Delong and Cosma was trying to do was figure out how to teach American students to imagine what some of the other (earlier) kinds of society (those which were not market societies) were like. They were not trying to imagine an equally-good or superior utopian alternative to market society.

There’s a symmetrical difficulty in understanding “family”, which takes on political and economic roles in societies with a weak state (some of them non-market societies.) In these societies “family” is not mommy and daddy and kids and brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and cousins at a family reunion.

In the XIXc a big Chinese family (clan) would have a military unit and would often effectively provide local government over an extended area. Economically it would function like a corporation, and extract profits from its clan members and from neighboring clans. The typical clan member knew that the clan head existed and had to be deferred to, but he might be a second cousin three times removed whom had never met.

Confusion about the traditional meaning of family was blatant in Ronald Reagan’s pronouncements to Muslims and Chinese on the importance that “family” had for him. By traditional standards, family was extremely unimpoortant to Reagan. To him all it meant was [aying the bills and not cheating on his wife.

Firstly, even when an elite can extract wealth from their serfs, they still would interact with markets. Eg http://www.history.ac.uk/eseminars/sem24.html describes the history of cities and markets, and the significant role of supply of food to cities, and how that would change in times of crisis. Consequently someone was selling food in response to markets, that these someones may have been mostly noblemen and monasteries rather than individual peasants does not mean that production was not being determined by markets. To borrow an example from PETA, farmers treat animals as property, but we would say that a NZ farmer is still part of a market-dominated society because their decisions about how to farm.

http://assets.cambridge.org/052149/5814/sample/0521495814ws.pdf

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:q3K5YQWAHisJ:orion.oac.uci.edu/~garyr/papers/LSMM_20june2003_EEH_final_submission_formatted.doc+markets+medieval+europe&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=28

So again we come to the definitional problem of what is a society with a market system.

Secondly serfdom died away in Western Europe during the medieval period. The institution lasted much longer in Eastern Europe, and was only introduced in Russia in the 16tn century. See http://www.answers.com/topic/serf or the Wikipedia articles. This is again societies managing to go for centuries with market-systems, implying that a market-system is not a historical anamoly.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia article states that a serf could decide what to raise and sell the produce of their own land at markets, but it doesn’t give a citation for this, and it doesn’t state where such rules applied (given the diversity of medieval Europe, I doubt it was universal), and I have never heard elsewhere that serfs had such rights over the produce produced on their own land, so I don’t know what probability to assign to the likely-truth of that statement.

Asserting that there are tribal, subsistence, hunter-gatherer societies which don’t do much trading is a trivial assertion. Of course there are. And I for one had no intention of suggesting otherwise.

The interesting issue is not whether there are “alternate modes of social organization.”

(If a grad student at Berkeley much less a commenter on this blog is not aware of such ” “alternate modes of social organization”….well…whatever.)

The interesting and non-trivial issue is whether you can have a complex, populous, presumably urban and technological society with values similar to ours (pluralist, tolerant, non-misogynous etc etc) without heavy reliance on markets to organize itself. It does not appear so but that is only an empirical observation.

Markets are information-processing devices and the need for information processing is low in hunter-gather-herding societies—so they don’t develop markets.

But as societies grow their needs for social coordination grow and the question is whether there is an alternative to markets as a way of successfully organizing an economy which has passed poverty. (I reject the term “market system” as it is not a recognized term of art.)

That’s why I asked the question about Constantinople. That’s why I sugggested Dune because it shows a weird mix of inherited feudal “aristocratic” power ruling parts of a very capitalist economy in which drugs are a critical element of social stability.

The interesting question is not about hunters and herders using vast landscapes. The interesting question is about complex urban cultures which value individual freedom and whether there is an alternative in them to markets.

I’m trying to persuade you to change the definition you are using as I think it is more valid to incorporate all of a population when deciding what a place’s society is like.

I am sorry I did not make this more explicit. I am trying openly to persuade people to change the definition, I am not attempting to do so secretively. I disagree with John’s definition and I am deliberately trying to change it. Is this explicit enough?

Incidentally, what’s the argument for ignoring the vast majority of the population in determing whether a society is market-dominated or not?

And by the way, I am not arguing that all societies are predominantly market-orientated. I am just arguing that there is a long history of societies predominantly orientated around the market. And this is part of my reason why I doubt the statement that “the market system is … but a delicate historical anomaly.”
Citing counter-examples in Afghanistan or Russia is not enough to disprove my case, someone has to disprove the examples I have cited.

Based on what John has so far said, the statement that “the political elites regarding money earned by markets as respectable is a historical anomaly” is much more supportable. It was not what was originally said though. (I don’t think we have enough data to judge whether such a situation is “delicate” – ask me again in 500 years :) ).

I think that the military factor in history and society is systematically always there, but tends to be treated as an ingression from the outside or a breakdown since right-thinking people don’t want to recognize it as normal.

It wouldn’t be quite accurate to describe this set-up as “feudal” — my great-grandfather wasn’t Amir Abdurrahman’s vassal in the sense that William Marshal was King Henry’s — but it was of the same general ilk. There were compelling reasons why agrarian societies generated arrangements like this, where big chunks of the economy fall under the sway of specialists in armed coercion, who hold clearly-defined pieces of territory as tenaciously as they can. (These reasons are clearly explained by people like Ernest Gellner and William McNeill, or for that matter ibn Khaldun.) As Jacob Levy notes up-thread, Adam Smith was very clear on the importance of neutralizing people like my ancestors. (Remember that the classical trio of factors of production is land, labor, and capital.) This is tricky enough, but neutralizing them without just setting up the central government as oppressive landlord in their place was even harder. A surprisingly strong case can be made (see McNeill again, or Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past) that the breakthrough to sustained, market-driven exponential economic growth ought to have happened in Song dynasty China, but it was that last bit which tripped them up.

Just having some markets doesn’t make a market society if the large decisions are made off-market. For example, serfs did not sell their product to the highest bidder; they gave negotiated amounts to the same man every time.

Athens is not a good example of a non-market society. It was probably more a market society than any society of its time, and more than most societies during the next 20 centuries or more. The early middle ages are a better example, or perhaps Mongol Persia or Ottoman Turkey. And markets were a factor in all of these societies, but big decisions (especially land-ownership and most of agricultural production) were non-market. Even much of XIXc Russia was non-market, with an unfree work force, and a mix of subsistence farming, landowner expropriation, and government expropriation.

And of course, not only were merchants, etc, often excluded from political life, but so were nearly all women. Again, just because someone is excluded from politics does not mean that they are not part of society. To put it another way, if women, male peasants, merchants, tradesmen’s lives were not part of society then what were they part of?

I tend to think of whether a society is pre-dominantly a market-orientated society in terms of whether people in everyday life trade in markets. In the case of ancient Athens, even the Athenian nobility participated in markets, eg the hero’s father has a farm on which the hero, his father and their slaves work (until war takes it away), from which produce is sold to support their lifestyle in town, as opposed to their being self-sufficient or gaining supplies through patronage relationships or some other means.

I agree that there has been a massive change in the acceptability of paid employment and directly handling money amongst the political elite. But remember that before the democratic reforms of the 19th century in most places around the world the political elite was a very small proportion of the total population. And even then as far as I know it was acceptable for a gentleman to improve his land and sell his estates’ produce.

Large parts of the economy dedicated to tribute, gifts, and offerings of various sorts, rsther than quid pro quo payments.

How much is large? How does this compare to modern welfare state transfers?

And how do you get figures on the sizes of the relative portions of tribute/gifts/offerings to total economic output in medieval Europe? – I always thought even the total GDP figures were terribly dodgy. And our records from then are biased because of the small number of people who could read and write and kept records. As far as I am aware economic historians are still arguing over total living standards in medieval Europe.

Large parts of the economy dedicated to tribute, gifts, and offerings of various sorts, rsther than quid pro quo payments.

The market is always present in non-market economies, and always exerts pressure on the other forms of organization, but after about 1700 in the West the market groups grew increasingly powerful and dominant, and the others increasingly marginal and powerless.

What is your criteria for deciding when a society is dominated by markets, rather than simply having markets?