経済人
Annette Weiner argued that the "norm of reciprocity" is deeply implicated in the development of Western economic theory. Both John Locke and Adam Smith used the idea of reciprocity to justify a free market without state intervention. Reciprocity was used, on the one hand, to legitimize the idea of a self-regulating market; and to argue how individual vice was transformed into social good on the other. Western economic theorists starting with the eighteenth century Scots economists Sir James Stuart and Smith differentiated pre-modern natural (or self-subsistent) economies from civilized economies marked by a division of labour that necessitated exchange. Like early sociologist Émile Durkheim, they viewed natural economies as characterized by mechanical solidarity (like so many peas in a pod) whereas the civilized division of labour made producers mutually dependent upon one another resulting in organic solidarity. These oppositions solidified by the late nineteenth century in the evolutionary idea of primitive communism marked by mechanical solidarity as the antithesis and alter ego of Western "Homo economicus". It is this armchair anthropology opposition that originally informed modern anthropological debate when Malinowski sought to overturn the opposition and argue that archaic societies are equally regulated by the norm of reciprocity and maximizing behaviour.