Richard Thurnwald · 1923
Thurnwald’s 1923 essay offers a comparative anthropology of economic formation. Against rationalist economics and linear evolutionism, it treats economy as a shifting adjustment among needs, technique, environment, psychic dispositions, and political association. Economic life begins in organic self-maintenance and only gradually becomes calculative; even then it remains tied to prestige, fear, ritual, affection, and coercion.
Die Vorgänge, die wir als menschliche Wirtschaft bezeichnen, stellen in ihrem Verlauf keine einheitliche Linie dar.
English translation: The processes that we designate as human economy do not, in their course, represent a uniform line.
This denial of one developmental line structures the whole argument. Hunting, gardening, herding, agriculture, aristocratic estates, court redistribution, money economy, and industry are not steps on a single ladder but historically unstable formations. Thurnwald therefore rejects the abstract homo oeconomicus: narrow acts of exchange may look calculating, but larger economic orders are shaped by kinship, caste, war, religion, honor, dependency, imitation, and collective emotion. Needs themselves are historical, since luxury may become necessity and scarcity or fashion may remake value.
Aus dem Dunkel des Instinktlebens taucht die Wirtschaft auf, nicht aber als etwas, das bei irgendeiner Gelegenheit in rationalistischer Weise erdacht wurde.
English translation: Out of the darkness of instinctual life the economy emerges—not, however, as something that was devised in rationalistic fashion on some particular occasion.
The first major movement analyzes the conditions of economy: nature, technique, individual psychology, and social-psychological interaction. Natural surroundings matter most where technical command is weak, guiding possibilities of collecting, fishing, hunting, pastoralism, cultivation, mining, or maritime exchange. Yet geography is never destiny, because migration, invention, and conquest alter what a landscape can mean. Technique registers mastery over nature, from hand, tool, fire, vessel, weapon, and trap to domestication, irrigation, roads, ships, and machines. But technical systems require social systems: canals, temples, palaces, storehouses, and fortifications imply organized labor and often coercion. Political associations oscillate between coordination and subordination, and each shift changes production, distribution, and surplus.
Das Verhältnis der Menschen zum Boden bildet zu allen Zeiten ein Grundproblem der Wirtschaft und der Politik.
English translation: The relationship of human beings to the soil constitutes at all times a fundamental problem of economy and politics.
The formation of economic value begins with production values: land, plants, animals, and human labor. Land is primary because subsistence, settlement, and sovereignty converge there, yet property does not begin as modern individual ownership. It grows through clan territories, use rights, kin claims, personal attachment to tools and products, and later privileged possession by chiefs, noble families, temples, or states. Domesticated plants and animals transform storage, mobility, work rhythms, and inequality; cattle may be food, wealth, bride-price, sacrifice, and rank. Labor becomes value through household dependency, gender control, slavery, tribute, and command. The decisive transition is from direct provisioning to indirect economy, in which some groups live from the work of others.
Das Sammeln von Prunkstücken und Wertträgern ist keine Kapitalbildung.
English translation: The collecting of ornamental objects and stores of value is not capital formation.
Exchange values emerge just as socially. Trade does not begin as impersonal market exchange but in gift and counter-gift, hospitality, friendship, kinship, ceremonial compensation, tribute, plunder, and guarded dealings with strangers. Shells, cattle, grain, mats, salt, beads, metals, and ornaments may be ritual signs, trophies, compensation media, or prestige goods before functioning as money. Money is thus an abstraction attached to a sign, presupposing trust that the sign represents future consumptive possibilities. From this distinction Thurnwald separates valuables, treasure, money, and capital: prestige goods may circulate and confer rank without becoming productive wealth.
The later sections condense this material into formation-types: small homogeneous groups with individually sociable provisioning; cooperative political economies linked by marriage and trade; aristocratic orders based on landed privilege, tribute, leisure occupations, and stratification; and imperial-despotical systems organized by court, officials, dependents, natural payments, and redistribution. These are analytic types, not fixed stages. Peoples move among them through migration, conquest, mixture, invention, class conflict, and altered needs. The final turn to capitalism stresses intensified indirectness: machine technique and universal money turn subsistence struggles into struggles over production means, finance, wages, and distribution. Yet Thurnwald rejects both economic determinism and idealist history. Modern categories—property, labor, money, capital, market—must be genealogically dismantled, because economy is a shifting metabolism of groups with nature and one another, mediated by technique, imagination, domination, and social form.
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