before and after neoliberalism elyachar.pdf

7/28/2019 Before and after Neoliberalism Elyachar.pdf

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CABEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM: TacitKnowledge, Secrets of the Trade, and the Public Sectorin EgyptJULIA ELYACHARUniversity of California, Irvine

Anthropologists have good reason to hate neoliberalism.1 Across the globe,

policies called neoliberal have had devastating impacts on the people with whom

anthropologists work. Referring to neoliberalism has become a shorthand way

of signaling all that is wrong in the ethnographic present, much as a previous

generation of anthropologists would refer to globalization. In the process, we have

risked turning neoliberalism from concept into epithet (Guyer 2007).2

By way ofcontrast, I draw here on neoliberalisms historiography to make sense of fieldwork

I conducted in Cairo with public and private sector bankers.3 I analyze my data in

light of debates in central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s that were foundational

to the establishment of neoliberalism. Those debates were about the feasibility of

conducting economic life through a planned public sector versus the free market

system.

Why turn to the history of political and economic thought to understandactually existing neoliberalism in Egypt or elsewhere? Failures of neoliberalism are

often individualized, calling forth invitations to try again and get it right (Foucault

2008:215266; Mitchell 2002:272303). My goal is not to show the gap between

the ideas of neoliberalisms founders and neoliberalism in practice. Nor is it to

show traces of the past in the present as opposed to thinking about the future

(Munn 1992:166; see also Guyer 2007). To think seriously about the future, we

need to better understand the political debates and conceptual conflicts that shape

our political and economic imaginary today. Otherwise, it can become too easy to

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 27, Issue 1, pp. 7696. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C 2012 by theAmerican Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01127.x


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BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM

projectvisionsofthefuturealongapathpreordainedbyasingularvisionofthepast.4

This is a matter of import for theoretical debates about neoliberalism anywhere and

for those defending the January 25th Revolution in Egypt as a revolution against

neoliberalism (Ambrust 2011).

I approach the broad issue of neoliberalism in this article by focusing on the

question of tacit knowledge. There are many possible meanings to tacit. The most

famous formulations in the 1930s were those of Heidegger and Wittgenstein in

philosophy. But the decade also saw the formulation of tacit desires in Freud; tacit

signs in Mead; and tacit concepts in Boas.5 In this article, I am concerned with one

particular formulation of the tacit from the 1930s: tacit knowledge as understood

by philosopher of science Michael Polanyi and adopted by Friedrich Hayek in his

formulation of the knowledge problem that was foundational to neoliberalism.

The centrality of tacit knowledge is important for anthropologists to un-

derstand for a few reasons. Anthropology is characteristically occupied with the

tacitthat which we reveal and render explicit through critical inquiry and ethnog-

raphy (Kockelman 2007; Strathern 1998, 2005). Neoliberalism, by way of contrast,

is what we often define ourselves against. But the tacit and neoliberalism are deeply

intertwined. My ethnographic research shows, furthermore, that arguments used

to justify privatization at all costs based on Hayeks early work do not hold up, evenon his terms. Finally, neoliberalism originated in debates among intellectuals in the

very specific historical circumstances of central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s,

which included the victories of Communism and the rise of National Socialism.

Neoliberalism is a theory grounded in a particular time and place. We can see

this better, and help provincialize neoliberalism, when we contrast the story of

its foundation with a very different debate in Egypt about the public sector and

privatization from the 1950s to this day.

CALCULATING THE PUBLIC SECTOR

My interest in tacit knowledge began in the field, with a public sector banker

I will call Mr. Amir.6 I would have known with my eyes closed that Mr. Amir

worked in the public sector when I first met him toward the end of 1995. Neglect

of the public sector was palpable in the smells and the heat in the building where

he worked. Air conditioning in Mr. Amirs office groaned more than it cooled:

the hot and humid air of Cairo in July could not be cordoned off. Here was the

feel of Cairo as lived by its poor majority, struggling each day to get to work in

ancient public buses or furiously beeping microbuses to jobs that barely paid for

the commute and food for the kids.77


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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 27:1

The bank had garnered millions of dollars in capital from foreign donors for

loans to Egypts working poor, unemployed, and youth. About 30 of my informants

in those years received such loans. It was still possible in the 1990s for these young

men (shabab) to believe in the exemplary life of the microentrepreneur being

promoted by development agencies and the Egyptian regime. It seemed to my

informants to be the bank, rather than the regime as a whole, that was keeping

them from their goals. This would change by 2010.

I found my way to Mr. Amir by accident. I expected nothing much from

the interview, but it turned out to be a crucial part of my fieldwork. Mr. Amir

had a college degree and spoke excellent modern standard Arabicbetter than the

bankers I worked with in USAID-fundedprograms who had been educated in French

and English schools in Cairo. Nor did he sprinkle English phrases into his Arabiclike they did in an interview situationeven when talking about banks or business.

Rather, he might switch to a more popular (shabi) level of Cairene Arabic instead.

Mr. Amir conducted his financial business in the flow of conversation, which was

punctuated, in turn, by a flow of cigarettes, phone calls, and streams of people

coming and going, offering coffee and water, and asking for help. He worked

three landlines on his sprawling desk without losing concentration or looking

harassed. Doors opened and closed; telephones rang and were answered; requestswere considered and addressed; cigarettes were passed across the room and lit.

Through these communicative channels, finance floweda kind of finance that

was neither abstract nor flattening (Simmel 1978). Although Mr. Amirs way of

gathering, filtering, and processing information could appear chaotic, he had little

problem assessing risk or calculating value. His lending unit was profitable and

had an excellent track record. His strongest lending technique and mode of risk

assessment, he said, was his sense (hiss) of the market, which he had honed over theyears.

Mr. Amir had started his banking career in 1965only a few years after

Gamal Abdel Nasser instituted sweeping nationalizations of Egyptian businesses.

Hewasbornina shabi neighborhood of Cairo and grew up before the Free Officers

Movement took power in a coup in 1952. He graduated from Cairo University

in 1965 with a degree in commerce (tigarah) and went straight to work for the

Industrial Bank. His training came on the job, like the craftsmen and small business

owners he specialized in funding.

The first day I met Mr. Amir he was in the middle of a meeting with the

owner of a small publishing house established in 1913. The ties between the bank

and firm were long and friendly. Mr. Nadeem, the owner of the firm, had taken78


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out a number of loans from the bank. He recounted them by name: the sixth

World Bank loan at seven percent interest; the Saudi loan to the bank, at easy

terms, nine percent, from which the bank had gotten its four percent spread; and

the seventh World Bank loan. These loans were named, not abstract finance, and

both sides remembered the details of each deal.

Mr. Amir was an employee of the state (dawlah) and a defender of the wealth of

the Egyptian people held in the state public sector. The government (hukumah), by

way of contrast, often stole and privatized that wealth for the benefit of a few. Mr.

Amirs job was to lend the states money and to make sure it would be returned.

Anyoneincluding government officialswho tried to steal the states wealth

was immoral. To guard against that eventuality, he had to know the market, as only

someone with long experience in constantly changing rules of the game could:

Whenever theres trade going on, whenever theres movement in trade,

theres going to be a parallel movement of swindling and chicanery, which

abound in the Egyptian market [en-nasb wa el-ihtiyal fi es-suq el-masri].

The swindlers a much nicer guy, much more appealing than the serious

man. The swindler will come in, dressed up all chic and beautiful, with

an impressive briefcase and cell phone. Hell talk to you real nice. Ive been

tricked lots of times. Now, I depend on my impressions and my sense of things,

100 percent. That is the only reliable way to know. Ive learned everything

from my experience with my clients, all coming in here with different styles

of dodging and feinting.7

What can we make of a public sector banker who relies first and foremost on tacit

forms of knowledge to preserve the states public resources? To answer, I will turn

to the calculation debate that led up to the establishment of neoliberal theory (as

well as theory of market socialism).

THE CALCULATION DEBATE AND JUST BEFORE NEOLIBERALISM

The calculation debate arose from a very practical policy dilemma.8 How could

an economy be run without private property and thus without prices? The Soviet

Union and other experiments such as municipal socialism in 1920s Vienna faced

these urgent questions. Communist intellectuals and others sympathetic to the

possibilities of central planning had to demonstrate the feasibility of the economic

organization of a socialist society (Rosner 1990:55; see also Hull 2006:146). This

initiated a wave of concern with how to calculate and account for value in a socialist

system.79


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The debate began in central Europe, in countries that were once part of

the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its elaborate systems of knowing and counting.

Marxists such as Otto Neurath, head of planning in the brief Bavarian Soviet

Republic, argued that lessons of the war economy could be drawn on for a

centrally planned natural economy without money or prices (Neurath 1919,

2004; Chaloupek 2007; Hayek 1935:3032; Hull 2006:146). Ludwig von Mises,

then secretary of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and organizer of one of

the most prominent seminars of the period (which involved one of his students,

Friedrich von Hayek), was scathing in his response. He outlined the problems

with calculation under socialism in his classic paper, Economic Calculation in the

Socialist Society, published in German in 1920 and in English in 1935 (Mises

1935). Socialists, he wrote, had not even begun to think seriously about the issuesinvolved with socialist economics.

Mises shifted the debate to the question of rationality itself. Rationaleconomic

activity, he famously proclaimed, is impossible in a socialist commonwealth.

Socialism was the abolition of rational economy (Mises 1935:110, 130; see also

Hull 2006:147). State intervention in the economy would, moreover, inevitably

lead to a completely centrally planned economy (Hull 2006:147; Mises 1935).

This laid the ground for Hayeks later famous claim that planning robbed peopleof their basic freedoms and turned them into serfs (Hayek 2007). Freedom relied

on price, which in a market situation could express even the unconscious desires

and knowledge of the individual. The only social system ever evolved for tapping

that knowledge and coordinating it as usable information was the system of private

property regulated by the rule of law. No single personlet alone a party or state

organizationcould know the economy. If an individual could not know what he

or she thought, then the very idea of central planning immediately collapsed.Even if the state owned the means of production, socialist economists replied,

managers could still compete as if they were capitalists. Given the same technology

and resources as capitalists, socialist managers could also reach optimal market

equilibrium (Foley 2006; Vaughn 1980). The socialists focused on proving the

theoretical possibility of planning in a mixed economy to the detriment of exploring

therelation of this model to howmarkets actually worked (Vaughn 1980:542544).

The debate between Hayek and socialists had a huge impact on economic theory,

shifting it away from equilibrium analysis (Foley 2006; Hull 2006:150). The once

prevalent assumption that economies tended to equilibrium emerged as a special

case of a more general problem of how knowledge is acquired and communicated

(Hayek 2009:46). But wider implications of the knowledge problem raised by80


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Hayek were not widely addressed at the time (Vaughn 1980:551552). Some of

the questions that remained are of great import today.

MAKING AND UNMAKING THE PUBLIC SECTOR

In Egypt the debate about the public sector versus the free market came about

differently.9 Debates and polemics among economists in central Europe about

planning and the public sector were not relevant to the establishment of the public

sector in Egypt in the 1960s. This does not mean that Egyptians were untrained

in economics or had no coherent approach to political economy. After all, Hayek

(let alone Mises) was marginal in the West until the revival of neoliberalism in the

1970s (Harvey 2005). Keynesian economics, which also relied on tools of planning

and was thus also a target of Hayeks wrath, was orthodox in Egypt as in the West.

Everyone in Egypt assumed the centrality of development economics and the

role of the state in economic life (Gouda Abdel-Khalek, personal communication,

March 30, 2010).

Most of the technocrats relied on by Nasser and his associates to run the

economy and to construct the public sector received their higher degrees from

universities in North America or Europe, from departments of commerce or plan-

ning, rather than economics per se. Abd al-Galil al-Imari had a degree in commercefrom Leeds University, had previously served in Egyptian administrations, and

was pretty much left alone to devise economic policy in the first years after the

coup (Tignor 1998:68). Rashid al-Barrawi had been a professor in the School of

Commerce at Cairo University, had socialist credentials, but favored liberalizing

laws that restricted the growth of Egypts potential oiland mining industries (Tignor

1998:6869).10 Aziz Sidqi, Egypts first minister of industry and the chief architect

of the public sector, went to the United States in 1946 to receive two M.A.s,in architecture and in planning, and then a Ph.D. in regional economic planning

from Harvard University in 1951, with a thesis Industrialization of Egypt: The

Case Study of Iron and Steel (Tignor 1998). Similarly, economics professors in

Egyptian universities in the 1940s and 1950s were usually educated abroad, mostly

in Great Britain or in the United States, while others went to France (Abdel-Khalek,

personal communication, March 30, 2010).11

The Free Officers did not set out to create a socialist economy. But in the

wake of a U.S. retreat on promises for a loan to build the Aswan Dam and the

tripartite aggression against Egypt in 1957, options moved toward socialism. All

this built on a long history of resentment about the domination of finance capital

and foreign banks in the country. For example, while the debates about calculation81


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and the role of banks in a planned economy were under way in Central Europe,

banks in Egypt in the 1930s were still drawing in significant deposits from Egyptian

investors and savers but sending those funds overseas to pay off their investors in

Europe, rather than investing anything in a national economy (Mitchell 2002;

Tignor 1998:35).

TheFreeOfficerspassedOrdinanceNumber22in1957,whichstipulatedthat

all banks operating in Egypt were to have only Egyptian shareholders and Egyptian

directors (Tignor 1998:136). Banks such as Barclays Bank, the Ottoman Bank,

Credit Lyonnais, and Comptoir nationale dEscompte de Paris were made Egyptian

at a stroke. Some of these banks had been present in Egypt for more than 100 years

In the same year, the Free Officers laid the legal groundwork for the establishment

of the public sector and created the Egyptian Economic Organization (al-Muassasaal-Iqtisadiya), the legal entity and primary instrument for the expansion of the public

sector in the years to come (Tignor 1998:136137). Nationalization proper began

in July 1961, with the issuance of laws 117, 118, and 119. In December of the same

year, the Supreme Council for Public Organizations was established to supervise

38 public organizations, themselves comprised of 367 companies. By 1967, the

sweep of organizations supervised by the Supreme Council was 48 organizations

overseeing 382 affiliated companies, in operations ranging from arms productionto theatres (McDermott 1988:122).

The socialist laws left the power of the state virtually unchallenged in the

corporate sector (Tignor 1998:163). The Nasser regime proclaimed that it would

achieve popular control of economic institutions by way of public sector control

(Tignor 1998). Establishment of a public sector would drastically increase industrial

productivity even as it created a more just society (Tignor 1998). A pervasive

antimonopoly stance of the Free Officers (Vitalis 1995:215217) was matched bythe imperative of development. If capitalists would not invest to grow the national

economy, then the state would expropriate their resources and do it for them.

These views, rather than the calculation debate, shaped the making of the public

sector in Egypt.

The economy created by these Egyptian economists, planners, and engineers

looked quite different than the picture of economic domination painted so starkly

by Hayek in 1977 in The Road to Serfdom (2007). Like Hayek, the planners of the

public sector in Egypt were staunch antimonopolists (Vitalis 1995). But the public

sector they made was much different than what Hayek had predicted. Egypt ended

up with a loosely regulated public sector, where decentralization and a great deal

of freedom of operation reigned. The private sector, by way of contrast, was82


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tightly regulated (Tignor 1998). (A vast range of workshops producing all kinds

of economic services and products were generally left out of the debates about

planning.)

TACIT KNOWLEDGE AND ENTRENEURIAL SUBJECTS IN POLANYI

AND HAYEK

The debate about planning was in no small part a debate about knowledge.

Planned economies, whether socialist or Keynesian, relied on statistical information

gathered by state agencies. But this kind of technical knowledge missed much of

what was central to the actual workings of the market. Formal economic models

and statistics gathered by the state could not take into account the entire realm

of tacit knowledgeunsystematized, unverbalized forms of knowledge that were

integrated into the body itself, rather than being formed in the brain through the

study of books.

The idea of planning, Mises and Hayek maintained, rested on a fallacy. Dis-

persed fragments of knowledge existed in and were wedded to discrete bodies and

minds; they could not be brought together and abstracted in one mind (Hayek 1945;

Hull 2006:150). Both the socialists and the national socialists (and the Keynesians,

soon enough) were thus fatally misguided from an economic point of view. Theproblem was not merely computational. Each person has some advantage over

all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use can be

made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left

to him or are made with his active cooperation (Hayek 1945:530). As such, the

question of whether planning was possible lacked not only an answer but also the

intellectual mastery of a problem which so far we have only learnt to formulate

(Hayek 1935:242).Hayeks formulation of this problem built, first of all, on Misess critique

of socialist calculation. But like a good anthropologist (Strathern 1998, 2005),

Hayek also imported the concept of tacit knowledge from outside his field to

shift the grounds of debate. He got the concept of tacit knowledge from Michael

Polanyi (brother of Karl). Polanyi was a chemist and polymath who had become

anticommunist after visiting the Soviet Union to investigate Soviet claims to a

proletarian science. He spent much of the rest of his life arguing for the freedom of

science and for a theory of tacit knowledge as central to all aspects of the scientific

endeavor as well as to economic life.

Polanyi argued that even in his own original field of chemistry, the most exact

of sciences, something inexact was essential to scientific discovery (Gill 2000;83


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Polanyi 1966, 1974). This inexact source of knowledge lay inside the individual.

It could not be known or tapped even by the individual who bore that knowledge,

let alone to a scientific planner. Throughout his career, Polanyi emphasized the

individual nature of discovery, unhindered by official or dogmatic interference

(Cash 1977). Economic life, just like science, could not be planned. Like science,

it should be left to evolve as a spontaneous order.12

Scientific research, Polanyi wrote, should proceed like the free market. There

could be no central control, planning, or any form of association that determined

the actions of its members (Baker 1978:390). The scientist needed to be like

an independent businessman in liberal society (Baker 1978). Just as businessmen

needed to rely on freely available information to adjust the prices of his goods,

thus helping in regulating production, so the scientist used the results published byother scientists in determining the course of his own research; and knowledge accu-

mulated as a result (Baker 1978). Polanyis simile for the scientistthe individual

entrepreneurial subjectis quite striking. Hayek overthrew the economic subject

as conscious individual. But he only went halfwayto an unconscious individual

economic subject.

TRAINING OUT THE TACIT IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR

According to Hayek, the free market alone can take advantage of tacit knowl-

edge. The public sector cannot use it. I found something different in my fieldwork.

Granted, my data is limited, but I found that tacit knowledge can be cultivated

in the public sector and squashed in the private sector. Such a finding would

undercut Hayeks justification for why the public sector must be avoided at all

costs.The public sector created under Abdel Nasser began to be privatized in

the 1970s. Privatization in Egypt and other postcolonial states at the time was

not justified through the theory and ideology of neoliberalism. The revival of

neoliberalism in the West was just under way in the 1970s (Harvey 2005). It did

not make its way into development orthodoxy until the 1980s and 1990s. Can we

say that conditions for the cultivation of tacit knowledge in Egypt increased with

privatization? Privatizationproceededunevenly andhas been contestedat every step

of the way in Egypt by unions, unorganized workers, various political parties, and

professional organizations (see Beinen 2010). Privatization of the banking system

was agreed to in principle but was resisted in practice through the 1990s. As late as

1998, four state-owned banks still accounted for 80 percent of commercial deposits84


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in Egypt (OECD n.d.:1, I.4).13 Ten years later, privatization had put about half

of the banking sector in private hands.14

Given the obstacles to privatizing banks in Egypt in the 1990s, the USAID

and others instituted programs aimed at extending the scope of the private sector

via microlending. As part of my fieldwork on microfinance, I attended a number

of training sessions for bankers entering that field. One such training session in

1995 was held in the Baron Hotel in Heliopolis, was funded by USAID, and was

led by one of my informants, Mr. Shawqi Adil, who was head of a microlending

program at the private sector bank NDB. Mr. Adil had begun working in finance

before the Free Officers coup of 1952. He worked for public sector banks in the

Nasser era and rejoined the private sector after 1976, having spent eight years in

the Gulf working for a Saudi Arabian bank, where he made his fortune. His mi-

crolending program was extremely successful.15 He was well funded by multilateral

funders and international NGOs, charged about 22 percent interest, and claimed a

100 percent repayment rate. Mr. Adil hoped his program would become the

Grameen Bank of the Middle East.

Inside the Baron Hotel in Heliopolis, some 80 young men and women settled

into their chairs for the second day of the training program. Adil gave a lecture

about banking, trust, and the informal economy. He then opened the floor forquestions. Audience members politely asked about repayment and loan policies

and other technical matters. A young man named Ahmed then asked a question

that led to a lively outburst of laughter, interjections, and more shouted questions.

Mr. Adil stood silent and perplexed for a minute. When things got chaotic, as he

later complained, he raised his voice, demanded silence, brought the impromptu

debate to a close, and returned to the format of the training session as if nothing

had happened.The question that Ahmed had asked concerned a term from Egyptian Arabic

called fahlawah that is difficult to translate but can mean street smarts or trickery.

Ahmed wanted to know if he could usefahlawah in retail banking as a representative

of the bank. Someone then asked Ahmed to define fahlawah. He could not. Others

tried. They could not find a satisfying definition, and completely ignored Mr. Adil in

their excitement. Mr. Adil thought the question was disrespectful and a distraction

from the topic at hand, as he told me later. I think he was wrong.

FAHLAWAHAND SECRETS OF THE TRADE

In Middle Eastern studies, fahlawah is usually discussed in the context of

popular Egyptian culture of the poor urban masses of Cairo. Fahlawah implies85


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such qualities as sharpness, cleverness and alertness and a kind of intelligence

that springs from experience rather than formal education (El-Mesiri 1978:50).

It comes from continuous interaction with all sorts of people, [through which] a

person becomes knowledgeable about human behavior (El-Mesiri 1978). Fahlawah

is a characteristic of the ibn al-balad, the young male heroic figure of the popular

classes who defends the weak and community property, and watches out for his

own (Elyachar 2005:137138; El-Mesiri 1978:41).

But fahlawah comes into local analyses of the Egyptian economy as well.

Economist Talaat Abdel-Malek, for example, has used the term to describe how

the Mubarak regime gave verbal compliance to orders from the United States and

the International Monetary Fund to privatize the economy, even while keeping up

practical resistance (Abdel-Malek 2002). A master offahlawah knows with whomhe is dealing and how to act in any particular situation, in the market and in politics.

From this point of view, fahlawah can be used to advantage in the marketplace or

in politics by a weaker group against a stronger or as a way to access information

that is not available to all. El-Mesiris use offahlawah as a kind of intelligence aptly

describes how Mr. Amir worked as a banker. Both Abdel-Maleks and El-Mesiris

usages described tacit knowledge, which Mr. Adil refused to consider. Rather, he

insisted on preformatted technical knowledge of a kind that Hayek said doomedthe public sector to failure.

Polanyi and Hayek located tacit knowledge in each individual. Individuals

were woven together in the market into a broader wholea spontaneous order

via the price system, which translated their knowledge into useful information.

Without that price system, tacit knowledge would remain buried. In Cairo, among

workshop owners of the popular classes, as Ahmed intimated with his question

about fahlawah, the situation is different. Knowledge in the workshops is trans-mitted across generations through apprenticeship, and information is constantly

conveyed back and forth horizontally across workings in settings from the cof-

feehouse to the workshop to the street. This information is not accessible via a

uniform price system. Knowledge of the market and essential market informa-

tion is available to anyone who is a member of the same semiotic community

(Kockelman 2005:261262) or who is a master of the language and gestural re-

sources that would mark him as such. Mr. Amir was such a person. To access this

kind of knowledge of the market and how it worked from the outside, you needed

to be a master of fahlawah, which is where Ahmed seemed to be heading with his

question.

86


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Fahlawah is not the only concept in Egypt that renders explicit tacit knowledge

inthemarket.Secretsofthetrade (asrar el-mihnah) is another kind of tacit knowledge

that was recognized by my informants as central to market life. That was the case

both in craft workshops and in the public sector bank. Secrets of the trade usually

refer to tacit ways of doing things that were historically transmitted in the course of

apprenticeship in thecraftguilds (tawaif al-hirafiyah).Theydidnotdisappearwhen

guildsweredissolvedaslegalentities.16 Thesesecretswerealegallyrecognizedform

of intellectual property in Egypt through its long nineteenth century (Chalcraft

2004, 2005). My informants completely accepted that those secrets were the

legitimate property of workshop masters.17

Mr. Amir was being pushed by funders in the World Bank to demand that

his borrowers in small-scale enterprises send their workers for training sessions.He refused this condition because his borrowers, he said, were too concerned

about losing their secrets of the trade: The manager is afraid of losing his skilled

workers and his secrets of the trade (asrar al-mihnah). We have to work around

those concerns. I was struck by his use of this term. I had not expected someone in

a public sector bank to be concerned about this concept associated with Ottoman

history and craft workshops. Likefahlawah, the topic of secrets of the trade is usually

confined to Middle Eastern studies, although they are not completely foreign toWestern economic history. They are discussed in literature on the guilds in England

through the early 19th century (Thompson 1993:234268)18 and in Adam Smiths

The Wealth of Nations, where he writes of the guilds and secrets of the trade as part

of the Inequalities occasioned by the Policy of Europe (Smith 1981, vol. 1:135).

Smith was concerned that secrets of the trade could lead to deviations, whether

occasional or permanent, of the market price of commodities from the natural

price (Smith 1981, vol. 1:80). E. P. Thompson, by way of contrast, focuses onsecrets of the trade as part of the cultural commons of the guilds in English history

(Thompson 1993). Secrets disappeared in classical political economy after Smith.

The Turks (as they were called by Smith and others) and their secrets were

relegated to the footnotes and metaphors of economic history within the social

sciences. Then they disappeared from economics altogether. But their traces can

be found in modern property law, including copyright and intellectual property

and in the notion of trade secrets.

MANAGEMENT STUDIES AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

I cannot say what rendered tacit knowledge and secrets of the trade invisible

to neoliberal policy makers and their local agents in Egypt. Polanyis and Hayeks87


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obsession with the individual as the locus of tacit knowledge may have been a cause.

Another reason might be a common distain for knowledge practices associated with

the popular classes of Egypt. Topics such as secrets of the trade and fahlawah can

seem both uneconomic and archaic. But management studies has had no such

worries.

Inspired by research carried out by anthropologist Jean Lave with tailors

and their apprentices in Liberia (Lave 2011), in the 1980s management studies

drew heavily on the notion of tacit knowledge. Lave formulated the concept of

communities of practice to talk about tacit modes of learning in an apprenticeship

situation. Her concept was transplanted by her student Etienne Wenger into

management studies and taken up by John Seely Brown, director of Xerox PARC

and also one of Wengers advisers. This spawned a mini industry of books about thetacit knowledge lurking in communities of practice within the center of Western

market society.

Books and articles soon proliferated on the topic of tacit knowledge in jour-

nals and scholarly books in management studies as well as in the business press

(Allee 1997; Huysman 2004; Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995:103106; Tsoukas

2003:420425; Tsoukas and Mylonopoulos 2004:78). Management studies fo-

cused on tacit knowledge as being generated by practitioners of a trade who learnby doing and are unable to describe what they know or how they know it. Practi-

tioners and theorists were interested in how to capture, transmit, or convert tacit

knowledge into explicit knowledge that could be used by an organization or firm.19

Communities of practice became here a sociotechnical device that could generate

tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is collective in origin but unmarked by traces

of property or possession and thus is available for the taking by agents who could

mine, format, and claim it. Tacit knowledge became a new source for profit.No one in the management debates brought up the question of property. That

is, no one talked about who should benefit from the outcomes of tacit knowledge.

As long as secrets of the trade were recognized as property of the guild, the

profits of tacit knowledge accrued to members of the guild. As secrets of the

trade were written out of political economy and disappeared as a property right,

tacit knowledge lost its status as a collective form of intellectual property. Tacit

knowledge was individualized together with the community in communities of

practice (Duguid 2008). Tacit knowledge ended up back where Hayek and Polanyi

had located it: in the individual entrepreneurial subject. Tacit knowledge was but

a free resource awaiting appropriation by the firm. No property rights wed it to

the community in which it had been spawned. The rediscovery of tacit knowledge88


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thus appears to be another step in the inexorable march forward of neoliberalism.

But the story is not so simple.

TOWARD A CONCLUSION

Socialism was a utopian dream, according to Mises and Hayek. Polanyis

concept of tacit knowledge was central to their argument of why that was so.

But the neoliberal free market they espoused in contrast was at least as utopian.

Outcomes of policies called neoliberal and promoted by think tanks such the

Cato Institute, the Koch Brothers, and the Mont Pellerin Society that Hayek

himself founded, moreover, have little in common with the economic model and

functions of the market that Hayek espoused. The point of rereading the debates

that helped create neoliberalism, and locating them in their contemporary context

is not to measure the gap between the dream and the reality. Rather, it can help

us better understand how traces of those debates that are left out of dominant

accounts still affect us in the ethnographic present.

Opposed to the free market in the calculation debate was the public sec-

tor, with its potentially vast powers to destroy rationality and spread like a can-

cer through the economy as a whole. But the public sectorand Egypt was no

exceptionnever had the vast powers feared by the early neoliberals. Nassersregime may have been totalitarian, but the public sector was not. Instead, it was a

sprawling entity. As Hayek predicted (but to different effect), no one could know

it, and no one, therefore, could control it (Tignor 1998:185). Decentralization and

autonomy prevailed (Tignor 1998). Egypt was not unique in this regard. Managers

under socialism could never could know or command everything (Verdery 1996,

2003). We need to know a great deal more about how firms in the public sector

actually worked. Unraveling the myth of a monolithic public sector is also anessential part of decoding mystical beliefs in the free market.

Hayek raised complex and rich questions in the calculation debate. Most

anthropologists would be comfortable with those questions. Few would find fault

with his critique of statistics as the basis for knowledge. Few would reject the insight

that markets are decisively inter-subjective and complex unplanned systems

(Foley 2006:207). It is a mistake to dismiss Hayeks early questions together with

the outcomes of the neoliberalism he helped create. Nor should we write about

neoliberalism as if it had agency (neoliberalism does this or that) or grant it more

coherence than it in fact possesses. For such an approach indirectly reinforces

the ideological coherence of neoliberalism, as Gibson-Graham (2006) pointed out

some time ago regarding capitalism.89


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Mr. Amir agreed with Hayek in many ways. Knowledge was unstable and em-

bodied, and it escaped statistics. But Hayek, following Polanyi, saw tacit knowledge

as internal to the discrete individual. Mr. Amirs tacit knowledge was a collective

affair. It belonged to those who spoke Egyptian Arabic, had access to its semiotic

resources, and were master practitioners of market life. Tacit knowledge was a

collective inheritance, embodied in collective subjects. It remained so even if not

recognized as a property right. A successful public sector banker had to be a son

of the people, ibn al-balad, the exemplary figure of Egyptian shabi culture. He had

to know how to maneuver in any kind of situation, how to talk the language of

the educated with the educated, the language of the streets on the street, and the

language of the elite with the state. He had to be a master of fahlawah (cleverness)

and to know how to operate and maneuver in all kinds of changing situations(El-Mesiri 1978:49). For Hayek, the existence of tacit knowledge showed why

collective planning was a logical impossibility. For Mr. Amir, tacit knowledge was

a collective competence essential to the profitability of the public sector bank. It

was his responsibility, as a custodian of state resources, to be a master of fahlawah

and tacit knowledge of the marketplace.

Secrets of the trade are a collective embodied knowledge practice. So is

fahlawah. The exemplary figure of the ibn al-balad, in turn, is a defender not onlyof the weak and of community resources as traditionally understood but also of

collective semiotic resources and embodied knowledge. These semiotic resources

and embodied practices are forms of tacit knowledge. They are locally recognized as

being valuable; the exemplary figure of the ibn al-baladalready makes this recogni-

tion clear. But unlike secrets of the trade, these resources and practices have never

been conceptualized as a property right. As tacit knowledge they have potential

economic value. This much we can take from Hayek, as well as from his variousintellectual heirs who theorized how to mine cultural practice for profit in the

1980s and 1990s (Elyachar 2005). But need we assume that the potential economic

value those resources and practices represent is always, necessarily, dispossessed

by neoliberalism once recognized? Debates about indigenous knowledge in politics

and in anthropology have made clear this need not be so. But those debates have

also shed light on the intellectual and political pitfalls of conceptualizing indige-

nous rights through the framework of intellectual property rights (Anderson 2009;

Coombe 1998; Hayden 2003). Debates in the history of thought from Egypt and

the Ottoman Empire about secrets of the trade as a property right could be useful

here as well.

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Until recently, it has been easy to dismiss efforts to uncover new forms of

knowledge and value as inherently neoliberalmeaning, here, as leading inevitably

to dispossession. That answer has been pervasive in anthropology. To ask whether

the search for new forms of knowledge and value can lead to a different kind of

political project than neoliberal dispossession both takes us back in intellectual

history and forward to future political and fieldwork projects. It shows how much

more complicated the history of neoliberalism is than we tend to believe. As

ethnographers of neoliberalism, we need to go back to the highly conjectural

moments of the 1920s and 1930s and pick up other strands of the debate about

neoliberalism. We also need to think about those footnotes of economic history in

Smith that reference secrets and guilds from the East and bring those back to the

forefront of our investigations into anthropology of the economic. In the process,we will greatly enhance our ability to see traces of the future in the disasters that

neoliberalisms have wrought.

ABSTRACT

For anthropologists, the term neoliberal often becomes a shorthand for indicating all

that is wrong with the present. But such usage of the term can foreclose our ability to

imagine different futures. In this article, I go back to a time before neoliberalism, when

economists and philosophers were engaged in debates about the rationality of economicplanning within market economies, and in which the concept of tacit knowledge

was pivotal. These 1920s and 1930s thinkers, especially Hayek and von Mises, were

convinced that collectivism and planning would not work, and their work is cited still

today as having established the basis for laissez-faire (neoliberal) capitalism. I critically

juxtapose their findings with a historical analysis of the public sector in Egypt, with

a short excursis into management theory (and research on tacit knowledge), and with

my own ethnography. Looking at the case of a successful public sector banker I worked

with in Cairo, I show how he relied on tacit knowledge as a collective inheritance that

was embodied in collective subjects and secrets of the trade. My findings thus call

into question Hayeks argument about the irrationality of collectivism and economic

planning. They also point to the importance of tacit knowledge practices as collective

and public goods in our economic imaginary of the future.

NOTESAcknowledgments. This article was presented as a paper at the International Center for Ad-

vanced Studies, New York University; the Department of Anthropology, University of California atIrvine; and the Conference on Rethinking Capitalism, University of California at Santa Cruz. I thank

members of those audiences for their comments and questions. I also thank for their help, commentsand suggestions Essam Fawzi, Lisel Hampton for superb copy editing, Gouda Abdel-Khalek, PaulKockelman, Jean Lave, George Marcus, Tomaz Mastnak, Timothy Mitchell, Laila Moustafa, TaylorNelms, Robert Tignor, and Jessica Winegar, as well as two anonymous reviewers ofCultural Anthro-

pology, the previous editors ofCultural Anthropology, Kim and Mike Fortun, and the current editors,Charles Piot and Anne Allison. All remaining errors and oversights are my own responsibility.

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1. I have no roomin thisarticle todiscuss dominant approachesto neoliberalism, but the interestedreader can turn for summaries to Barry and colleagues (1996), Harvey (2005), Plehwe andcolleagues (2006), Rose (1996), and Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005). On neoliberalism inEgypt, see Ambrust (2011), Elyachar (2005), and Mitchell (2002:209304). It would be moreaccurate, in an article discussing the origins of neoliberalism, to use the original spelling of the

term, neo-liberalism, coined by Hayek and others to distinguish their theory from the failuresof liberalism, but I use the more common current spelling for ease of the reader.2. Just to be clear, I am not saying that neoliberalism is fine after all, that neoliberalism doesnt

exist, that the words of neoliberalisms founders matter more than actually existing neoliber-alisms in the present, or that movements against neoliberalism are misguided.

3. Most of the fieldwork I draw on in this article was conducted between 1995 and 1996, withfollow-up fieldwork in 2005.

4. I am grateful to Taylor Nelms for helping me formulate this point.5. I am indebted to Paul Kockelman for this point.6. I conducted these interviews with Mr. Amir together with my colleague Essam Fawzi.7. This conversation took place in 1995, before the dramatic penetration of cell phone service

into Egypt. In the 1990s, the cell phone was still one of the symbols of a particular kind ofbusinessman.8. My discussion of the calculation debate here is necessarily abbreviated. For three very different

reviews of the debate, see Foley (2006), Hull (2006), and Vaughn (1980). Thanks to TaylorNelms for referring me to Vaughn.

9. On history of the public sector in Egypt, see Waterbury 1983:57123; Vitalis 1995:169217;and Tignor 1989, 1998.

10. See Vitalis (1995) for a crucial analysis of this period and the individuals I mention here.11. Abdel-Khalek adds that in the 1960s through the early 1970s, classical and Keynesian eco-

nomics, economic development, economic planning, and public finance were key subjectstaught in economics departments. The Egyptian economists society, Societe Egyptienne

DEconomie Politique, de Statistique et de Legislation, supported the work of the professionand published a quarterly Misr al-Muasirah/LEgypte Contemporaine. On its 50th anniversary in1957, the society also published al-Iqtisad al-Misry fi Nisf Qarn (The Egyptian Economy in Halfa Century). My thanks to Prof. Abdel-Khalek for communicating this information to me. Seealso Vitaliss discussion of the Fuad I Society for Political Economy, Legislation, and Statisticsand its role in the formulation of economic policy in the 1950s and the surprising reversal ofmany of the Egyptianization policies of the late 1940s in Egypt (Vitalis 1995:202).

12. Although spontaneous order is usually associated with Hayek, the consensus is that heborrowed the concept from Polanyi (Jacobs 2000). Istvan Hont traces the concept back toAdam Smith (Hont 2005:105).

13. See OECD n.d.

14. See IMF 2007. Thanks to Timothy Mitchell for this reference.15. One public sector bank called it the bank with the car (abu-arabiyah): the bank that went around

selling loans like fast food. It referred to the small size of the loans of such programs that werebased on the model of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh.

16. On apprenticeship and secrets, see Herzfeld 2004.17. The relation of the tawaif al-hirafiyah to the experience of the guilds in Western Europe is a

matter of much debate in the literature. For two good reviews of the debate, see Chalcraft2004and Ghazaleh 1995, 1999. In retrospect, that debate confronted, independently of subalternstudies, the vast issue of commensurability and translation between the Western social sciencecategories and concepts in the Ottoman and Mughal empires.

18. Thompson relies heavily in this section on the writings of Francis Place. He mentions secrets

of the trade in relation to Places work with tailors (Thompson 1993:255, n. 4).19. In one critique of the debate about tacit knowledge in management studies, Tsoukas puts

it as such: Tacit knowledge cannot be captured, transmitted, or converted, but onlydisplayed, manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit

becomes explicit, but when our skilled performanceour praxisis punctuated in new waysthrough social interaction (Tsoukas 2003:426).

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Editors Notes: Cultural Anthropology has published a number of essays on bankingand credit, including Clara Hans Symptoms of Another Life: Time, Possibility,

and Domestic Relations in Chiles Credit Economy (2011), Douglas R. Holmes

Economy of Words (2009), and Karen Hos Situating Global Capitalisms: A

View from Wall Street Investment Banks (2005).

Cultural Anthropology has also published essays on numerous economies. See, for

example, Danny Hoffmans Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in Contempo-

rary West Africa (2011), Daromir Rudnyckyjs Spiritual Economies: Islam and

Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia (2009), and Shao Jings Fluid Labor

and Blood Money: The Economy of HIV/AIDS in Rural Central China (2006).

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