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The mention of the great city of Vienna conjures up the many legacies of music, art and philosophy which it nurtured. But as important as any of these is the more prosaic legacy of the Austrian economists ranging from C. Menger to F. von Hayek. And for some, Vienna may conjure up as well, the debate that K. Polanyi had with these economists in the 1920s. However paradoxical it may seem, it was by virtue of this debate, carried on directly and indirectly over a lifetime, that Polanyi was...

Karl Polanyi's most famous book, The Great Transformation, contains several ideas and theoretical notions which are at the heart of long-lasting controversies throughout the social sciences. Categories such as "double movement," "embeddedness," "disembedding," "market society," or "social freedom" have proved to be fruitful notions not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, political sciences, and economic history. The recent three volume publication of Karl Polanyi's writings during...

This article offers an alternative institutional economic approach to the informal sector by interpreting the works of economists Karl Polanyi and Alexander Vasil'evich Chayanov. Far from withering away, the informal sector continues to occupy an important place within economies in general and within the so-called developing economies in particular. Relatively speaking, the informal sector is inferior and more spontaneous, if not actually incomplete. Within the informal sector there are...

The article analyzes the global economy by subjecting it to an interpretive scheme derived from popular culture Boganism, an Australian colloquialism or street slang used by teenagers. Boganism, the social phenomenon of being both unaware and irresponsible, is the result of a particular type of human abandonment. This abandonment is linked to the new hypercapitalism of globalization. The article will establish the structural roots of boganism, examine the case of the abandonment of U.S....

This paper brings together data from 17 OECD countries on scientific publications, patents and production, to explore the relationship between scientific and economic specialisation for 17 manufacturing industries. Since Marx, there has been a fundamental debate in economics about the link between science and the economic system. Marx argued that the needs of production shape scientific developments and that science has become a factor of production, whereas Polanyi argued that developments...

This article explores Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the institutional separation of politic and the economy in the context of the 19th century market economy. The contribution his analysis could make to the quest for viable alternatives to the contemporary neo-liberal international order depends on how we construe two key concepts in his work, “disembeddedness” and “countermovement”. In this regard the author suggests that: 1) In Polanyi’s work the disembedded economy appears not as a...

This paper is based on the idea that between the 1920s and the mid-1930s in Vienna there were two forms of heterodox economic theory: the Austrian economic school headed by Ludwig von Mises and another interesting form of heterodox economics opposed to the Austrian school (above all politically) and pursued by various social thinkers (Otto Neurath, Karl Polanyi, Otto Bauer, Felix Schaffer, Felix Weil, Jacob Marschak). They were engaged in the debate on the possibilities of a planned economy:...

The debate about so-called economic globalization has reached a new phase. The hegemony of neo-liberal thinking has ended, in the face of both the increased and increasingly effective resistance to the social consequences of neo-liberal market-making - rising inequality and insecurity throughout the world - and the visibly dysfunctional effects of lack of regulation - currency and stock market crashes, among others. Thus, the story about 'the rise and fall of market society', which was first...

Relire K. Polanyi nous affranchit d'une double illusion. Selon la première, l'homme est essentiellement un atome utilitaire exploitant les gains supposés de l'échange, cette vieille « fable du troc » n'étant pas remise en cause par l'économie des « coûts de transaction ». La seconde illusion, construction hétérodoxe voulant s'affranchir de cette fable, attribue à la monnaie les traits d'une institution aussi transhistorique qu'universelle. Certes, de nombreux phénomènes qualifiés de « troc »...

L'article expose la problématique d'un texte peu connu de Polanyi datant de 1959. Prétextant un commentaire de L'ère de l'opulence de Galbraith, il soutient que le naturalisme de l'économie dominante nous interdit de comprendre la signification véritable de la rareté. Polanyi montre alors que les oppositions classiques entre liberté et égalité, économie et démocratie, peuvent être dépassées dans le cadre d'une société nouvelle abolissant la séparation institutionnelle de l'économique et du...

The starting point of this paper is this comment by Rhoda Halperin on the relationship between Marx and Polanyi. Our objective is, however, to examine how reading of Polanyi could be useful to understand, or supplement, Marx’s own views on both capitalism and the “human condition” in general, rather than vice versa. In this regard, we argue first that those followers of Polanyi who believe that Marx should be treated as a rival of Polanyi, and that Marx’s “historical materialism” and his...

The history of modern economic thought has been pre-occupied with the question of economic transformation or development. This survey of important contributions to the economics of development includes many economists not normally considered as pioneers in this field. The contributors point to the role of imperialist considerations in the early development of economic thought and the development discourse, and the impact of pressures for social and political reform. The economists and...

We extend Karl Polanyi's traditional economy concept to modern economies with advanced technology that are embedded in a traditional socio-cultural framework. This is the New Traditional economy, seen in parts of the Islamic world and with the Hindu nationalist movement in India. However, rural India is also the largest repository of the Old Traditional economy with its Hindu caste and jajmani system of reciprocal labour relations. The changes in India's complexly mixed economy, with its...

This article examines the relevance of the Karl Polanyi's contributions to economics in general and to the issue of endogeneity of human preferences in particular. Although Polanyi never spoke of endogenous preferences, one can capture in his work a vision of the historical specificity and institutional dependence of human purposes and reasons for behavior. It is undeniable that in Polanyi there is a certain tendency to overlook human volition and to fall into a kind of institutional...

This article argues, within the context of Karl Polanyi's work, that the common view of Chile is doubly miscontrued, in terms of free market economics. Events since the end of the dictatorship (1989) tend to confirm Polanyi's hypothesis in 'The Great Transformation' (1957; discussed in the following section) while at the same time negating the Chicago School's view that a free market society could be built--even under a dictatorship. In Chile from September 1973 onward through 1989, the...

The article presents the shared vision of Polanyi and Heilbroner. This paper focuses on the parallel ideas of economists Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. Their concept on the role of market system in the emergence of economics as a field of study is explained. More issues included are the requirements for the transformation of a pre-market society into a true market, Polanyi's influence to several economists, and relevance of the Polanyi/Heilbroner vision of the market system to the...

The ideas of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation have often been referred to in the recent debates that have emerged as a reaction to the rise of neoliberal policies. This paper deals with contradictory interpretations of the notion of social protectionism in the work of Karl Polanyi. There are two opposing interpretations distinguished here. The first interprets social protectionism as a balancing principle of economic liberalism. The second understands social protectionism as a part of...

Mark Blyth's rebuttal to our constructive critique of Polanyi "blithely" takes for granted the accuracy of Polanyi's now-outdated historiography of capitalism--by means of a loose, overly expansive definition of capitalism that question-beggingly equates it with modernity. Blyth emphasizes the need to view markets as "socially embedded," with which we agree--but he appears not to take account of the individual self-interest that is thus embedded. Similarly, he asserts a priori the role of...

KM: a section focuses on Polanyi's analysis of the social and political construction of markets and of "market society" in Europe, and then discusses the extent to which this type of analysis can be applied to the formation of global markets in the late twentieth century. It then looks at gender dimensions and the tension between the assumptions of economic rationality associated with market behaviour and the real-life experiences of women and men. Beneria then extends this analysis to the...