More Milton Friedman Institute Blogging...

Tyler Cowen points us to University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's denunciation and condemnation of George Soros's Open Society Institute as:

Marshall Sahlins: an exclusive rich-man's club of millionaire members entitled to special academic privileges. That sort of participation of the wealthy is discriminatory, and perhaps the most obvious clue to the ideology behind the promoters' assurances of free empirical inquiry.... [The] Institute... [is] the vanguard of an intellectual coup d'état in the academy of the same nature as the one the Chicago Boys helped pull off in Latin America.... By rendering the production of knowledge dependent on the highest financial bidders, the institute would literally transform the university into a free market in ideas — wherein those ideas backed by the most capital will be the most true. That is not intellectual diversity but academic perversity because it fundamentally subverts the disinterested pursuit and dissemination of knowledge for which universities were founded...

Marshall Sahlins also, for good measure, denounces Friedrich Engels's funding of the work of Karl Marx as illegitimate. For Engels's funds established a:

Friedrich Engels Institute for Political Science... [a] radical... approach to society and the economy... directly subsidized by private funds... an academic instrument of a certain ideology... an extremist version... that has proven to serve the welfare of the ruling elite in a number of countries at the cost of whom it may concern — notably the society in general and the poor in particular...

Forgive me if I do not find Marshall Sahlins's principle to be a neutral principle. It seems to be that wealthy philanthropists should only be allowed to fund lines of work in subdisciplines if senior anthropology professors approve.

Sahlins's true purpose, of course, is not to denounce as illegitimate either George Soros's funding of democratization efforts and scholars around the world or Friedrich Engels's funding of the work that became Capital. Sahlins's true purpose is, rather, to denounce the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman Institute. I must say that Sahlins doesn't think much of the power and robustness of his own "substantivist" ideas about economic anthropology:

[P]romoters' defense of the Milton Friedman Institute on the grounds of freedom... academic freedom, individual freedom, or free enterprise... is... a recipe for tyranny, since it would consist mainly of their ability to dominate the academy by virtue of the assets in cash and clout they command in the larger society. The Milton Friedman Institute will provide the rich and powerful with the best self-promoting ideas their money can buy... the university will be compromised by this commodification of knowledge in which a certain orthodoxy about free markets and self-serving individualism easily proves to be the highest bidder.

In fact, neither markets nor individualism of this sort are present in the majority of societies known to history and anthropology — even as the study of these societies provides an understanding of our own family existence, where the relations between goods are likewise governed by the relations between persons. Yet along with much else, such understandings of economy and society are destined to be buried by the behemoth Friedman Institute, whose so-called scientific work... is committed to the elimination of all such alternative forms of the human condition...

I must admit I never got much out of the work of Marshall Sahlins...

Sahlins's claims http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf that hunter-gatherers lived in "the original affluent society" where all their wants were easily satisfied seemed to me a dishonest evasion of the fact that many people in all societies want to see their grandchildren grow up--and relatively few hunter-gatherers do. Sahlins's claims that it was "the market-industrial system [which] institutes scarcity, in a manner completely without parallel... [because where] all livelihoods dependon getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity..." seemed to indicate a total, willful, and culpable ignorance of practically all of the non-market settled agricultural societies of the past ten thousand years.

And it had always seemed to me that Gananath Obeyeseke had a good point in his debate with Sahlins: Obeyeseke maintained that British insistance that the Hawai'ians regarded Captain James Cook as a living avatar of a God had little to do with Hawai'ians imposing their myths about Lono on Captain Cook. It had, he said, more to do with the British imposing on the Hawai'ians their myths about how the British acquisition of technological knowledge had made them "like God":

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying... of the tree of knowledge... thou shalt not eat of it.... And the serpent said unto the woman: 'Ye shall not surely die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God...