For an anthropologist who had such a profound and wide-ranging impact on the discipline as a whole (and not just on the economic subvariant with which he is usually associated), Keith Hart had an unusually un-anthropological career in many respects. (Or perhaps Hart’s trajectory merely illustrates the fact that in the discipline that he referred to as a “holding company for a bunch of mavericks” (Alexander and Wardle 2019) many if not most of us have unusual and at least in some respects un-anthropological careers.) After his dissertation fieldwork in Ghana in the 1960s, he did little or no fieldwork. In an intellectual milieu obsessed with otherness and alternatives to the Western canon, he proudly styled himself as primarily an intellectual historian of that scholarly tradition. Where other roughly contemporary figures such as Marshall Sahlins and Jane Guyer ultimately sought truth and/or the grounds of theory in the enchanted universe or a radically inductive empiricism, Hart never stopped going back to the classics—Kant, Rousseau, Mauss, Polanyi, and Keynes, to name but a few—for intellectual inspiration and guidance. As a result, it is hard to shake the notion that on a better timeline he would have been a conservative of some stripe. On this one, however, though no revolutionary politically, he remained a consistent and trenchant critic of the inhumanities of an epistemic moment caught between what he termed the end of national capitalism and a more equitable world society that has not yet come into being.

One reason in particular underlies the magnitude of his contribution to the discipline: Keith Hart was an anthropologist of the both/and. This is not quite to say that Hart was interested in actor-networks (or was himself an actor-network) avant la lettre, but the man was concerned with both root and rhizome long before that became a thing. Hart was enduringly attentive to both the individual and (and in) society, though he cast this as looking backwards to Durkheim’s homo duplex rather than askance toward contemporary formulations of the dividual.

This emphasis was rooted in his Kantianism.¹ Indeed, for Hart the original coin-with-two-sides was the Kantian dialectic of form and content, that is to say, of mental construct and empirical substance. Where other disciplines and, for a while, other anthropologists demanded the singular declaration of allegiance of a coin flip, Hart reminded us that the really important valence of this apparent binary was not the opposition between heads and tails but their consubstantiality. In his justly famous and evergreen 1985 Malinowski Lecture, state and market, ritual exchange and profane commerce, the altruistic (or at least other-minded) and the self-interested are inseparable and mutually indispensable. Correspondingly, Hart never ceased to push back against scholarly approaches he saw as neglecting one side for the other or as using heads and tails as the basis for constructing incommensurable or otherwise immiscible worlds. This was equally true for mainstream economics’ de-emphasis of the state in favor of the market as it was for what he saw as Marilyn Strathern’s infelicitous reading of Mauss (by way of Christopher Gregory) as the basis of a gift world/commodity world distinction that came to color much of twenty-first-century economic anthropology with a totalizing cast.

By contrast, in his own work, Hart was avowedly interested in money, the gift, and exchange more broadly as mediators—that is to say, as ways of “reckoning one’s relations to the rest of the planet” (Tresch 2022). Horacio Ortiz notes that this vision of money as a “connector” which simultaneously makes us “conscious of our own interdependence” and which serves, especially in societies like our own, as a key component of “constructing the self” (Alexander and Wardle 2019) derives from Simmel. Yet although Hart’s work was deeply informed by classic Western social thinkers and broadly ethnological rather than ethnographic, it still foregrounded the necessity of learning from the world.

Hart once wrote  that he “wouldn’t be an economic anthropologist if [he] didn’t believe in the historical project of economics” (2011) despite its recent debasement by “the economists” themselves. But this attention to economic life was, of course, of the both/and variety—in which both the human and systemic elements carried equal weight and in which the ultimate goal was not the overthrow of a monolithic and idealized (or dystopianized) version of capitalism by an equally singular and abstract alternative, but the careful and “inclusive” elicitation of the plurality of economic forms and practices found in any given context.

The substance and significance of the legacy Hart leaves for the discipline and for my own subfield of the anthropology of money are indisputable. Nonetheless his resolute universalism and monism are at the same time (mostly) a blessing and (just a little bit of) a curse. While Hart’s critique of the gift world/commodity world distinction that has sprung up over the last three decades or so is well taken in its particulars, the ability of what is tantamount to an anthropology without otherness to fully comprehend the complexity of human exchanges in a way that doesn’t render them as always already economic on some basic level remains an open question. What we lose by foreclosing the possibility that the human relationships we encounter and analyze as anthropologists are not simply emblematic of economic life in the plural, but of other forms of life that received terms and concepts parse only incompletely, if at all, is not a question his work is interested in asking.

This caveat notwithstanding, Hart’s both/and approach, which has been front and center in his work on money since the 1980s, must be seen as both building on and advancing upon the prior efflorescence of interest in economic anthropology in the 1960s—the formalist/substantivist controversy (which Hart himself saw as a kind of quasi-farcical replay of the Methodenstreit of late nineteenth century German economics). The reader will likely recall that formalists held that economic rationality is a human universal best understood by the scientific (read: scientistic) methods of contemporary economics. Substantivists, by contrast, argued that in times and places outside the developed world, different cultural logics shaped the relations of production, distribution and consumption, that structure all human societies.

In the context of this debate, which eventually petered out into nothingness, substantivists did themselves no favors by ceding analysis of capitalism to the economists. Arch substantivist George Dalton’s work, moreover, was savaged by Andre Gunder Frank in terms that highlight just how far Hart’s work progressed. “Dalton,” Frank memorably wrote, “speaks of thousands of economies … whereas in fact he is confronted by only thousands of parts of a single economy.” As a result, he suggested, “Although the professional division of labor may well assign the study of small social units to anthropologists … it does not exempt them from the scientific responsibility of studying those units in the context of the social whole that determines their most important characteristics,” namely, the global economy as a whole (Frank and Dalton 1970).

It would be too simple to label anyone who suggests, as Hart did, that “we should not allow our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to lead us to discount the marginalist revolution” (2011) as a substantivist in any simple sense. Moreover, the nature of Hart’s anthropology means that he is at once both formalist and substantivist in ethos. Nonetheless, in his work on human economies and more broadly we can see a kind of augmented substantivism that has taken on board (or anticipated) Frank’s political economic critique. As Vito Laterza put it in a collective reflection on Hart’s work, “when anthropologists focus just on non-Western others, without looking, as Keith does, at world history, we become dupes of our own institutions” (Alexander and Wardle 2019). It has been Hart’s great gift to us to save us from this and other perils by combining empirical openness to economic pluralism with a well-grounded and well-read attention to “the context of the social whole.”