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97 Indifference and Envy Girard and the Anthropological Analysis of Modern Economy Girard and Economics René Girard himself has not written very much on economics, at least explicitly, though his works are full of insights into and short remarks on the sacrificial origin of different economic phenomena or the way in which mimetic relations and commercial transactions are often intertwined and act upon each other.1 Unlike religion, psychology, psychoanalysis, literature, and anthropology, the analysis of modern and traditional economies from the point of view of mimetic theory has never been carried out by Girard himself, but for the most part by other people—for example, in the French-speaking world, which I know best, essentially by Michel Aglietta and André Orléan in La violence de la monnaie (1982) and by Jean-Pierre Dupuy and myself in L’enfer des choses (1979), as well as by others, such as Mark Anspach, Andrew Feenberg, Pierre Lantz, André Orléan, Georges-Hubert de Radkowski, and Lucien Scubla in various works on economy, economic anthropology, or the place and role of money in literary texts.2 In a way, this is somewhat surprising since the relationship between mimetic and economic phenomena, at least in a broad sense, was seen quite early on. For example, soon after the original publication of Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961), the 98 On Economy and Economics French Marxist Lucien Goldmann wrote in his Pour une sociologie du Roman (1964) that Girard’s work was the most important book to read in order to understand the effects of economic alienation on literature since Georg Luckas’s Theory of the Novel (1920). Moreover in a footnote in Les origines du capitalisme (1971), Jean Baechler suggested that those wishing to understand the nature of the infinite desire for acquisition that capitalist economies have institutionalized should read Girard’s book.3 Whatever the reason for Girard’s relative disinterest in economic phenomena, others have not been prevented from tackling this problem, and it bears witness in a special way to the dynamism and intellectual power of the mimetic theory that its application to the field of economics has essentially, if not entirely, been due to the work of others rather than to the efforts of Girard himself. The Substantivist-Formalist Debate In the late 1940s and early 1950s a debate began that divided (and still divides) the community of economists and of anthropologists interested in economic phenomena. It concerns the nature of economy and is generally referred to as the substantivist-formalist debate. It was first formulated in the works of the Austrian economist Karl Polanyi.4 In The Great Transformation (1945), a book on the history of the formation and organization of the market economy in Europe from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, Polanyi already argued that the modern market economy was a rare historical accident. Furthermore Polanyi said that, unlike what liberal and economic ideologies pretend, there is nothing natural about the market. It does not correspond to any spontaneous human tendency to barter and exchange, and it does not arise by itself as soon as certain conditions are satisfied. On the contrary, modern markets have been put into place through sustained and voluntary state policies that consciously destroyed traditional solidarities, authorized the unlimited sale of land, and labor and literally created the labor market—for example, in England through the Reform Bill of 1834, which repealed the existing Poor Laws, which had prevented the free circulation of labor. The system formed by market economies, the balance of power among European states, and the gold standard granted Europe one century of unprecedented economic growth and relative peace, from the end The Analysis of Modern Economy 99 of the Napoleonic wars to the catastrophe of 1914. Yet that First World War, as well as the Second World War and the authoritarian political movements that led to it, were, according to Polanyi, the result of the inevitable collapse of a system wrought with contradictions. The collapse was inevitable because the market system rested on some very particular political and economic conditions—the balance of power and the gold standard—and because neither that dependence nor those conditions were clearly understood by the system’s proponents. However, the main reason the breakdown of the market system could not have been avoided is because it is a highly unnatural economic system that replaces the normal function of economic activities, which is to ensure the livelihood...

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