Norman O. Brown on Modern and Archaic Economics (and Karl Polanyi)

To understand modern economics and money is to understand its relation to archaic [pre-modern] economics and money. But such a historical, and because historical also philosophical, approach to money is precisely what is lacking in the entire range of modern economic theory. 

Classical modern economic theorists, assuming the basic rationality of economic activity, assumed likewise that archaic economic activity was a core of secular rationalism in an otherwise rude and superstitious milieu. They assumed that economic activity was always and everywhere essentially the same in the fundamental motivation; economic activities were governed by economic motives-- that is, by economizing calculation. Assuming the psychology of economizing calculation, they correctly postulated its sociological correlate, the institution of ownership (property). Again from the psychology of economizing calculation, they deduced the division of labor and its institutional correlate, exchange in a market. 

But it is a safe generalization to say that the postulates of classical economic theory have no relation whatsoever to the anthropological facts. Archaic economics is not governed by economizing calculation. We can safely follow Karl Polanyi, the only economist who faces the facts and the problems they pose, when he says, "It is on this one negative point that modern ethnographers agree [in archaic economies we find]: the absence of the motive of gain [profit seeking]; the absence of the principle of laboring for remuneration [wage labor]; the absence of the principle of least effort [efficiencies]; and especially the absence of any distinct institution based on economic motives [free markets]. 

Excerpted from Life Against Death, 1959, "Filthy Lucre," pages 242-244.