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JULIA ELYACHAR University of California, Irvine

BEFORE (AND AFTER) NEOLIBERALISM: Tacit Knowledge, Secrets of the Trade, and the Public Sector in Egypt

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 of contrast, I draw here on neoliberalisms historiography to make sense of eldwork 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 understand actually 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 conicts 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. American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01127.x
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project visions of the future along a path preordained by a singular vision of the past.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 understand for a few reasons. Anthropology is characteristically occupied with the tacitthat which we reveal and render explicit through critical inquiry and ethnography (Kockelman 2007; Strathern 1998, 2005). Neoliberalism, by way of contrast, is what we often dene 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, even on his terms. Finally, neoliberalism originated in debates among intellectuals in the very specic 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 eld, 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 rst 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 ofce 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.

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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 eldwork. Mr. Amir had a college degree and spoke excellent modern standard Arabicbetter than the bankers I worked with in USAID-funded programs who had been educated in French and English schools in Cairo. Nor did he sprinkle English phrases into his Arabic like 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 nancial business in the ow of conversation, which was punctuated, in turn, by a ow 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; requests were considered and addressed; cigarettes were passed across the room and lit. Through these communicative channels, nance oweda kind of nance that was neither abstract nor attening (Simmel 1978). Although Mr. Amirs way of gathering, ltering, and processing information could appear chaotic, he had little problem assessing risk or calculating value. His lending unit was protable 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 the years. Mr. Amir had started his banking career in 1965only a few years after Gamal Abdel Nasser instituted sweeping nationalizations of Egyptian businesses. He was born in a shabi neighborhood of Cairo and grew up before the Free Ofcers 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 rst 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 rm were long and friendly. Mr. Nadeem, the owner of the rm, had taken

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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 nance, 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 benet of a few. Mr. Amirs job was to lend the states money and to make sure it would be returned. Anyoneincluding government ofcialswho 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 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 rst 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.

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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 issues involved with socialist economics. Mises shifted the debate to the question of rationality itself. Rational economic 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 people of 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 the relation of this model to how markets 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 by

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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 planning, rather than economics per se. Abd al-Galil al-Imari had a degree in commerce from Leeds University, had previously served in Egyptian administrations, and was pretty much left alone to devise economic policy in the rst 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 oil and mining industries (Tignor 1998:6869).10 Aziz Sidqi, Egypts rst 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 Ofcers 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 nance capital and foreign banks in the country. For example, while the debates about calculation

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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 signicant 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). The Free Ofcers passed Ordinance Number 22 in 1957, which stipulated that 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 Ofcers laid the legal groundwork for the establishment of the public sector and created the Egyptian Economic Organization (al-Muassasa al-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 afliated companies, in operations ranging from arms production to 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 Ofcers (Vitalis 1995:215217) was matched by the 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, was

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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. Dispersed 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. The problem was not merely computational. Each person has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which benecial 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, rst 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 eld 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 scientic endeavor as well as to economic life. Polanyi argued that even in his own original eld of chemistry, the most exact of sciences, something inexact was essential to scientic discovery (Gill 2000;

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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 scientic planner. Throughout his career, Polanyi emphasized the individual nature of discovery, unhindered by ofcial 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 Scientic 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 by other scientists in determining the course of his own research; and knowledge accumulated 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.

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TRAINING OUT THE TACIT IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR According to Hayek, the free market alone can take advantage of tacit knowledge. The public sector cannot use it. I found something different in my eldwork. 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 nding would undercut Hayeks justication 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 justied 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? Privatization proceeded unevenly and has been contested at 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 deposits

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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 eldwork on micronance, I attended a number of training sessions for bankers entering that eld. 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 nance before the Free Ofcers 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 microlending 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 oor for questions. 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 difcult to translate but can mean street smarts or trickery. Ahmed wanted to know if he could use fahlawah in retail banking as a representative of the bank. Someone then asked Ahmed to dene fahlawah. He could not. Others tried. They could not nd a satisfying denition, 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.
FAHLAWAH AND 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 implies

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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 gure 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 of fahlawah knows with whom he 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 of fahlawah 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 doomed the 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 transmitted across generations through apprenticeship, and information is constantly conveyed back and forth horizontally across workings in settings from the coffeehouse to the workshop to the street. This information is not accessible via a uniform price system. Knowledge of the market and essential market information 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 resources 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.
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Fahlawah is not the only concept in Egypt that renders explicit tacit knowledge in the market. Secrets of the trade (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 the craft guilds (tawaif al-hirayah). They did not disappear when guilds were dissolved as legal entities.16 These secrets were a legally recognized form 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. Like fahlawah, the topic of secrets of the trade is usually conned to Middle Eastern studies, although they are not completely foreign to Western 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 on secrets 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 Hayeks

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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 the tacit 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 journals 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 focused on tacit knowledge as being generated by practitioners of a trade who learn by doing and are unable to describe what they know or how they know it. Practitioners and theorists were interested in how to capture, transmit, or convert tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge that could be used by an organization or rm.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 prot. No one in the management debates brought up the question of property. That is, no one talked about who should benet from the outcomes of tacit knowledge. As long as secrets of the trade were recognized as property of the guild, the prots 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 rm. No property rights wed it to the community in which it had been spawned. The rediscovery of tacit knowledge

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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 sector, with its potentially vast powers to destroy rationality and spread like a cancer through the economy as a whole. But the public sectorand Egypt was no exceptionnever had the vast powers feared by the early neoliberals. Nassers regime 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 rms in the public sector actually worked. Unraveling the myth of a monolithic public sector is also an essential 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 nd 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.

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Mr. Amir agreed with Hayek in many ways. Knowledge was unstable and embodied, 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 gure 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 protability 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 gure of the ibn al-balad, in turn, is a defender not only of 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 gure of the ibn al-balad already makes this recognition 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 various intellectual heirs who theorized how to mine cultural practice for prot 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 indigenous 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 eldwork 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 economic planning 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 ndings 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 ndings 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.
NOTES
Acknowledgments. This article was presented as a paper at the International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University; the Department of Anthropology, University of California at Irvine; 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, comments and suggestions Essam Fawzi, Lisel Hampton for superb copy editing, Gouda Abdel-Khalek, Paul Kockelman, Jean Lave, George Marcus, Toma z Mastnak, Timothy Mitchell, Laila Moustafa, Taylor Nelms, Robert Tignor, and Jessica Winegar, as well as two anonymous reviewers of Cultural Anthropology, the previous editors of Cultural 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.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

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I have no room in this article to discuss dominant approaches to neoliberalism, but the interested reader can turn for summaries to Barry and colleagues (1996), Harvey (2005), Plehwe and colleagues (2006), Rose (1996), and Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005). On neoliberalism in Egypt, see Ambrust (2011), Elyachar (2005), and Mitchell (2002:209304). It would be more accurate, 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 failures of liberalism, but I use the more common current spelling for ease of the reader. Just to be clear, I am not saying that neoliberalism is ne after all, that neoliberalism doesnt exist, that the words of neoliberalisms founders matter more than actually existing neoliberalisms in the present, or that movements against neoliberalism are misguided. Most of the eldwork I draw on in this article was conducted between 1995 and 1996, with follow-up eldwork in 2005. I am grateful to Taylor Nelms for helping me formulate this point. I am indebted to Paul Kockelman for this point. I conducted these interviews with Mr. Amir together with my colleague Essam Fawzi. 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 of businessman. 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 Taylor Nelms for referring me to Vaughn. On history of the public sector in Egypt, see Waterbury 1983:57123; Vitalis 1995:169217; and Tignor 1989, 1998. See Vitalis (1995) for a crucial analysis of this period and the individuals I mention here. Abdel-Khalek adds that in the 1960s through the early 1970s, classical and Keynesian economics, economic development, economic planning, and public nance were key subjects taught in economics departments. The Egyptian economists society, Soci et e Egyptienne DEconomie Politique, de Statistique et de L egislation, supported the work of the profession and published a quarterly Misr al-Muasirah/LEgypte Contemporaine. On its 50th anniversary in 1957, the society also published al-Iqtisad al-Misry Nisf Qarn (The Egyptian Economy in Half a Century). My thanks to Prof. Abdel-Khalek for communicating this information to me. See also Vitaliss discussion of the Fuad I Society for Political Economy, Legislation, and Statistics and its role in the formulation of economic policy in the 1950s and the surprising reversal of many of the Egyptianization policies of the late 1940s in Egypt (Vitalis 1995:202). Although spontaneous order is usually associated with Hayek, the consensus is that he borrowed the concept from Polanyi (Jacobs 2000). Istv an Hont traces the concept back to Adam Smith (Hont 2005:105). See OECD n.d. See IMF 2007. Thanks to Timothy Mitchell for this reference. 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 were based on the model of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. On apprenticeship and secrets, see Herzfeld 2004. The relation of the tawaif al-hirayah 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 Chalcraft 2004 and Ghazaleh 1995, 1999. In retrospect, that debate confronted, independently of subaltern studies, the vast issue of commensurability and translation between the Western social science categories and concepts in the Ottoman and Mughal empires. 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). 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 only displayed, manifested, in what we do. New knowledge comes about not when the tacit becomes explicit, but when our skilled performanceour praxisis punctuated in new ways through social interaction (Tsoukas 2003:426).

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Editors Notes: Cultural Anthropology has published a number of essays on banking and 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 Contemporary 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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