【１】経済のグローバリズムは何もこの２０世紀の世紀末になっていきなり生じたものではない。確かに、戦後５０年ほどの冷戦体制の中では、自由主義世界の世界経済の枠組は比較的安定していた。【２】少なくとも、ブレトンウッズ体制に支えられてきた７０年代の前半までは、世界経済体制は、その内部に矛盾を含みながらも、比較的安定した制度的様式のもとに置かれており、それぞれの国家は、主として固有のケインズ主義政策、福祉政策、産業政策などを組み合わせてナショナル・エコノミーの安定と成長を達成してきた。【３】この戦後経済システムからすれば、９０年代に入ってからの世界経済の動きは新たな段階に入ったかのように見える。だが、もう少し長い歴史的な展望のもとで見ればどうだろうか。むしろ、ナショナル・エコノミーの枠組が安定していた冷戦期の約５０年の方が例外的だとさえ言えるのではなかろうか。
　【４】実際、資本主義経済の歴史とは、ほとんどグローバリズムと国家との間の抗争と依存の歴史だと言ってもよい。国境を越えて利潤機会を求めて拡張しようとする「資本」の論理と、国民の生活の安定条件を保証するという国家の要請は根本的に対立する面をもっている。【５】この対立は常に正面切って争われたわけではない。だが、潜在的であれ存在するこの対立が、経済についての２つの見方を形作ってきたと言うことはできよう。一定の場所からは容易に動くことのできない人間の生活を軸にして経済を理解するという見方が一方にあり、【６】他方には、逆にグローバルな資本の動きから「国益」を見ようとする経済の見方がある。この２つの見方、あるいは２つのロジックが経済の歴史を貫いていると言ってもよい。
　そして、おそらくいくつかの歴史状況の中で、この対立がきわめて鮮明に現れ出た時代というものをわれわれは見ることができる。【７】例えば、まだ西欧で近代資本主義が成立し、急速な展開を見せ始める頃、１７、１８世紀がその１つである。新大陸からの金銀の流入と対アジア、新大陸貿易の拡大という事態を背景に、オランダ、イギリス、フランスを中心に急速な商業の展開が見られたのであり、これはまぎれもなくグローバリズムと称してしかるべきものであった。【８】そして、このグローバリズムという現実に対して、重商主義と重農主義、さらには重商主義とアダム・スミスの経済学と∵いう２つの経済の見方が対立したのである。
　グローバリズムが明瞭に問題となる次の時期は１９世紀後半から２０世紀初頭の第一次大戦までである。
　【９】いわゆる帝国主義の時代であり、まさに帝国主義という名の経済的グローバリズムがこの時期を支配した。今日、マルクス、レーニン主義的な意味での帝国主義という呼称はあまり使われないし、マルクス主義的なレジームのもとでの帝国主義の理解はもはや適切なものではない。【０】それに代わって、ロビンソンやギャラハのいう自由貿易帝国主義もしくは自由帝国主義なる観念が支配的となったが、彼らが「自由貿易帝国主義」と言ったときには、多くの場合ユダヤ的資本とも結び付いたイギリスの金融、大商業を中心としたグローバルなジェントルマン的金融資本に主導された経済を考えており、これはむしろ、イギリス国内の産業資本とはときには対立するものであった。ここにも、明らかに２つの経済の類型を見ることができるのである。（中略）
　ところが、この第一次大戦は、別の意味で経済の構造を大きく変えるターニング・ポイントともなっている。というのも、第一次大戦を契機として、世界経済の中心はイギリスからアメリカへと移行したからである。そして、まさにアメリカ的なレジームのもとで経済の中にある２つの類型、グローバル・エコノミーとナショナル・エコノミーの対立というモーメントは背後に退いたのである。このことはまた本書の以下の章で述べるが、戦後のわれわれにはほとんど自明で所与のように見える、アメリカを中心とした戦後の経済構造こそ、むしろ歴史的には特異なものであったと言うべきだろう。その意味では、今日のグローバリズムの潮流は、そしてそのもとでの国家間の確執は、決して目新しいことではなく、むしろそれこそが資本主義の歴史を貫いているものだと認識しておいた方がよい。歴史は再び回帰してきたのである。

（出典：佐伯啓思（けいし）『貨幣・欲望・資本主義』）

There's a funny story that anthropologists tell to demonstrate how many different ways the same things can be named and classified, depending on the culture doing the naming. A group of anthropologists were giving a sort of IQ test to a band of tribesmen. The purpose of the test (and there really is such a test) is to see how someone will group a collection of twenty different objects drawn from four classes: food, tools, cooking implements, and clothes. The test predicts that the more intelligent individual will, for example, group apples and oranges under "foods" and knives and forks under "cooking implements."
In this particular test, the tribesmen consistently chose the "less intelligent" classification, however, grouping knives with oranges rather than with forks. After each classification, they would chant together a phrase in their own language that in translation might run, "This is how a wise man would do this." The anthropologists administering the test finally became irritated and asked the tribesmen "how a damned fool would do it." They immediately regrouped the knives with the forks and the apples with the oranges.
The moral of the story has partly to do with the different ways that various cultures classify the same things and partly with a sense of cultural superiority that causes one culture -- ours -- to judge the intelligence of other cultures by its own standards. It happens to be the case that our western approach to classification is an abstract one; we tend to group things together as concepts rather than as things. A knife, for instance, is a very concrete object and so is a fork, but an "eating implement" is a conceptual abstraction, a generalization rather than a thing. Our understanding of the actual knife and fork, in other words, is shaped by a cultural code that groups things conceptually and abstractly, and we expect all other "intelligent" people to understand such things in the same way.
But can't we look at knives and forks differently? After all, you use a knife, not a fork, to cut an orange, and so there would seem to be a perfectly good -- and intelligent -- reason for grouping the knife with the orange rather than with the fork. This, in fact, is precisely what the tribesmen in the story did: they classified the objects placed before them according to their concrete relations to each other. A knife, in other words, is concretely related to an orange because it is used for the physical act of cutting. Within the terms of a cultural code made up of concrete rather than abstract ideas, it is perfectly reasonable, and only common sense, to group the knife with the orange.
Even the most trivial of classifications can be seen sometimes to conceal a particular point of view. Several years ago, for example, the U.S. government created something of a sensation when it decided to classify tomato ketchup as a "vegetable" in order to save money on school lunch programs. At the time, a feeble attempt was made to defend this reclassification of ketchup from "table sauce" to "vegetable" on the grounds that since ketchup is made from tomatoes (which means, of course, that it is really derived from "fruit," but that's another issue) it could be seen as belonging to one of the four major food groups (which, if you're old enough to remember, were once the seven major food groups: meat, fish, dairy products, grains, green vegetables, yellow vegetables, and fruit). This attempt to change a classification was quickly abandoned, however, in the face of protests from parents and sneers from administration critics.
In the ketchup case, we find the conflict of two political interests. One believes that it is not the role of government to aid nutritional programs, and one believes that it is. From the former perspective, there may be a need to reclassify ketchup, but the decision to do so is determined by political rather than natural reasons. Conversely, keeping ketchup in its place as a "sauce" can also be seen to be a political decision because there is nothing to prevent us from viewing it as "food." It does have some nutritional value. The question is simply where we draw the line, and where that line is drawn will be determined by our interests, not by some "natural" power outside those interests.
In fact, all the most basic distinctions represent some human interest. Is a one-minute pause in a school classroom a "moment of silence" or a constitutionally forbidden "prayer"? Is a fifteen-year-old killer an "adult" or a "juvenile"? Are nuclear arms "offensive weapons" or "peace-keepers"? In each of these controversies you will find two sides equally certain that their designation is the right one, that they alone have drawn the line strictly according to the "truth." It would be nice if the truth were that easy to come upon, but in each of these cases the line we draw is only ideologically true.
The interests served by a classification scheme can sometimes be harmlessly personal. I was once told the story of a certain retired Harvard professor who, somewhat against his own more idle inclinations, had been persuaded by his wife to take up the fashionable hobby of bird watching. Wishing to avoid the labor of having to distinguish among, and remember the names of, too many species, he radically simplified the usual scheme by employing only four basic names for the classes of birds he was able (or willing) to recognize. These four classes included "crows," "gulls and robins," "small brown birds," and "other." That simplified things. Crows, gulls, and robins are easy to spot. So are small brown birds. Anything more complicated -- say, a scarlet ibis can be effortlessly put into the class of "other." But even this harmless approach to classifying animals contains ideological implications. As long as we are only talking about recreational bird-watchers, there's no problem at all. But if the question of where to draw the line appears in the context of a controversy over environmental protection, it can be quite another matter.
In the mid-1970's, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority's plan to build a dam on the Little Tennessee River was halted when it was discovered that the dam would threaten the survival of several local species such as the snail darter. Proponents of the dam argued that the snail darter was not an endangered species since there were plenty of closely related darter species scattered throughout the region. Opponents of the dam argued conversely that the snail darter was an irreplaceable component of the biological diversity of the earth and was accordingly covered by the Endangered Species Act of 1973'. The differing political interests of each camp were reflected in the way each chose to classify the darter. The pro-dam forces took a more general approach -- once you've seen one darter you've seen them all -- while the anti-dam forces insisted on detail. The whole issue depended on where you chose to draw the line. The line was finally drawn, and the snail darter was saved.
One reason we disagree so often on where to draw the line is because there are so many different ways to categorize objects and images. Thus, we usually classify them in terms of how they affect and serve our individual or cultural interest. An individual horse, for example, can be classified in quite a number of ways that are not all necessarily biologically based. There's nothing to stop us from seeing a horse as a rather oversized, short-eared donkey -- after all, with a little help from a breeder, horses and donkeys can interbreed -- but that would decrease the value of horseflesh, which would hardly be in the interest of the horse-breeding industry.
But what about the horse's potential to end up on your dinner plate? We eat cattle, after all, and horses, like cattle, are grazing animals generally classed as fit for the table within the terms of our code of cooking. This is the way the French draw the line to include the horse in the class of meats suitable for eating, and if you were a horsemeat butcher with an interest in opening up the U.S. market with fillet de cheval, you'd want to get Americans to think this way too.
How we choose to classify things may seem to be a trivial matter, but its implications can be very serious. For when one powerful group of people classifies another less powerful group as either inferior, or, even worse, not quite human at all, the result can be deadly. We only need to look at what happened to the American Indians in the nineteenth century, or to the European Jews in the twentieth century to see what horrible disasters can result from classifying human beings into groups.

anthropologist 人類学者
ibis トキ科の鳥
Tennessee Valley Authority テネシー渓谷開発公社（TVA）
snail darter タニシを常食とするスズキ科の小魚
Endangered Species Act of 1973 1973年の絶滅の危機にある種の法
fillet de cheval ［フランス語］馬のヒレ肉