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2009-06-29T09:32:40.677-04:00

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-06-51.html

“Primitivism” in the work of Moses Finley

In a careful, informative, and fair-minded review of Peter Fibiger Bang, The Roman Bazaar: A Comparative Study of Trade and Markets in a Tributary Empire (BMCR 2209.6.51), Harri Kiiskinen uses the term “primitivism” a bit recklessly in speaking of “the slow rise of the primitivist views, culminating in the work of M. I. Finley….” Without complaining about the review, I believe we need a further word on the widespread but misleading notion that Finley was a “primitivist.”

Bang quite carefully places the term “primitivism” in inverted commas (20, 28, 33, 48) and speaks far more often of “cultural” and “culturalist,” emphasizing (as Finley also did) the need for a discriminating use of anthropological approaches in discussing classical antiquity.

Although often dubbed a “primitivist,” Finley neither acknowledges nor commends the term. On the rare occasions when he employs it, he does so in a pejorative sense. He sought rather to “’re-establish economic life’ within the cadre of the polis” as he put it “Classical Greece,” in Second international conference of economic history, vol. 1: Trade and Politics in the Ancient World, ed. M.I. Finley. (Paris, 1965), 12 [quoting F. Will].

The notion of Finley as “primitivist” is “documentable” only inferentially, by positing “primitivism” as the sole permissible antonym to “modernism”: a crude binarism that ignores Finley’s actual arguments. As Richard Saller put it, “Finley broke with Polanyi who denied the significance of commercial markets in antiquity precisely because, in Finley’s view, the ancient economy was not primitive.” As Saller notes, the “Classical Greece” essay speaks of “the intrusion of genuine market (commercial) trade, on a very considerable scale and over very great distances, into the Graeco-Roman world [with] a feedback effect on peasant markets and the rest to such degree as to render the primitive models all but useless.” (“Framing the Debate over Economic Growth,” in Walter Scheidel and Sitta von Reden, edd., The Ancient Economy [New York: Routledge, 2002], p. 253.)

There are many ways to view the ongoing disputes over ancient economic history. I concur with the widespread opinion that “primitivism” vs. “modernism” is an outworn opposition. It is outworn partly because of the careless use of terms: we recall that both Max Weber (when contesting Eduard Meyer) and Finley insisted that terms and concepts be used with the same exacting precision as, say, the “facts” produced by archaeological excavation.

A different way to view the disputes might be to note that the tradition begun by Weber and carried on by Finley treats economics as only one element in a cultural whole. Hinnerk Bruuns has recently called attention to this by noting the coexistence in Weber’s work of social, political and legal as well as economic considerations, in distinction to the narrower economic concerns of Gunnar Mickwitz. (“Gunnar Mickwitz et l’héritage de l’école historique allemande de l’économie,” in Mika Kayava, ed., Gunnar Mickwitz nelle Storiografica Europea tra le Due Guerre [Roma 2007], p. 51.)

Dan Tompkins, Temple University
pericles@temple.edu

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