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Substantivism stemmed from the writings of Hungarian lawyer-turned-historian Karl Polanyi, who argued that capitalism is a historically unique kind of economy that is disembedded from the social matrix. By implication, the socially embedded pre-capitalist economies studied by anthropologists, historians and classicists cannot be understood using the formal economics developed to analyze capitalist economies. Rather, new tools for analysing their 'substantive' economies must be employed....

Individual life in general; It is determined by political, economic and sociological structures. The main forces that shape these structures are the state, market and society, respectively. When the views of Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek on the state, market and society are considered comparatively, a holistic approach can be reached for understanding human life. In this context, the two thinkers have been the pioneers of two opponents lines in social sciences by putting forward opposite...

This article advances Rodrik's political trilemma of the world economy by using insights from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which helps to grasp the interwoven dynamics of long-term transformations due to climate change and geopolitical reordering on one hand, and on the other short-term political ruptures due to countermovements. Rodrik's globalization trilemma shows the incompatibility of hyperglobalization with the need for an enlarged democratic policy space. Its nodes...

The article proposes to address the current discussions about national capitalism and the Argentine economy from a set of canonical ideas of the work of Karl Polanyi. Argentina, which for several decades has been going through recurring crises in its economic model, awakens a plurality of voices from social scientists and specialized journalists who debate the problems, limitations and projections of national capitalism. For this, we have surveyed these discussions, to a greater extent, from...

This chapter examines Polanyi’s institutional theory of market-capitalist society. It shows that market society is, according to Polanyi, a peculiarly “economic” society: its economy appears both autonomous and dominant, constraining the structure and evolution of other social subsystems. The chapter also demonstrates that Polanyi’s theory and method allow an explanation of the institutional transformations of market society. In the face of today’s great economic difficulties, social...

Institutional economics is a sociocultural discipline and policy science which draws on the idea that economies are best understood through an appreciation of history, real-world institutions, and socioeconomic interrelations. This book brings together leading institutionalists to examine the tradition’s most essential perspectives and methods. The contributors to the book draw on a broad range of institutional thought from the classic work of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl...

Happiness economics unearths the undesirable effects of economic growth and criticizes the economic model based on the belief in the supremacy of market relations over the relational bonds of society. Economic growth brings about substantial increases in material well-being; yet, it has the potential to destroy the social and environmental fabric of society. This is visible in the post-World War II cross-country variability of the subjective well-being measures, which shows the importance of...

Neoliberalism has been able to change the markets and the economy of societies around the world. These transformations are especially important with regards to fictitious commodities: land, labor, and money. However, the 2020 pandemic imposes new limits, when life itself is at risk globally. This work highlights the major neoliberal reforms relating to fictitious commodities, the difficulties of society to resist and create counterweights. The health crisis that has emerged with the COVID-19...

Capitalism is a social relation that cannot be reduced to the characteristics associated with it - markets, private property, profit and profit orientation. This relation can be shaped in different ways. The article refers to Karl Polanyi’s idea of the ›always embedded market economy‹ in order to develop basic characteristics of an example of post-capitalist economic ethics. Alternate abstract: Der Kapitalismus ist ein soziales Verhältnis, das sich nicht auf die mit ihm in Verbindung...

We examine parallels and differences in the analyses of societal transition by Karl Polanyi and Joseph A. Schumpeter. We argue that although their understanding of historical processes differs - transformational-political vs. evolutionary-natural - the central mechanism of change they describe is the same. We identify three spheres essential to both authors' works: the economic, the political and the socio-cultural sphere. Polanyi and Schumpeter describe an expansion of the economic sphere...

The article deals with the first stage of the market economic system - the traditional market economy. The traditional market economy is considered in the assessment of its main researchers. The main goal of the study is to identify the main characteristics and features of the traditional economy, which would explain the absence of pronounced cyclical elements in it. It is assumed that several essential elements of such an economy carry the strongest countercyclical potential. The article...

The welfare system was meant to reduce the 9 vulnerability of citizens to the market, thereby containing the consequences of the market economy and labor commodification. [...] As an adaptation to the consequences of the market, the welfare system is an effort to cushion the effects of the market, not a change its underlying logic of commodification. [...] From this perspective, the political debates about the rules to be applied to the operations of the platform economy are part of the...

The chapter reconstructs the emergence and formulation of Karl Polanyi's central research question: How is responsible freedom possible in a complex modern society? The origins of this question in the time before the First World War and the confrontations with the challenge of neoliberalism and fascism are discussed. It is shown that Karl Polanyi's concept of freedom has four dimensions. Polanyi connects negative, positive, substantial and social freedom with each other and formulates a...

The chapter reviews aspects of the possible transformation of the financial system into a banking complex, that comprises both embedded Too Big to Fail (TBTF) financial institutions and disembedded ones. The transformation of the financial system into a two-tier banking complex is the result of the disconnection of the TBTF embedded institutions and the right size to fail disembedded financial institutions. The chapter revises the scope and consequences of this change on the monopolization...

Una pregunta clave que surge de la pandemia de coronavirus es qué se requiere para hacer de esta fase temporal un camino hacia el cambio transformador. O, como sucedió en gran medida después de la crisis financiera de 2008, ¿volverá la sociedad a una economía dominada por el crecimiento y cargada de carbono basada en una ética del individualismo radical y el consumismo desenfrenado, informada por recetas neoliberales? Este artículo se basa en el trabajo de Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) para...

Les analyses de Felix Schafer, alors le plus proche collaborateur de Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), permettent de comprendre un débat entamé en 1922 à Vienne entre Polanyi et Ludwig von Mises (qui était alors le représentant le plus célèbre de l’école autrichienne). Les enjeux de leur opposition devaient structurer la pensée polanyienne en son entier. Dans les décennies suivantes, notamment les années 1940-1950 aux États-Unis, c’est en esquissant une approche de type sociologique que Polanyi...

This paper was inspired long ago by Jared Diamond (1997), and in particular by his extensive use of the concept of economic surplus as the key to the development of civilization. Unfortunately, Diamond does not mention the origin of the concept in classical and pre-classical economics, nor does he pay much attention to debates in economic anthropology about the role of economic analysis in studying primitive and ancient economic formations. These debates were the subject of a recent book by...

Este ensayo pretende demostrar cómo el mercado autorregulado que pregonael neoliberalismo es una falacia y que tiende tarde que temprano a acabar odestruir las propias condiciones sociales, ambientales y culturales que aseguranla vida en el planeta. Basado en una globalización financierista, en la privatización yen la liberalización de mercado, ese modelo se ha convertido en la mayor fábrica deempobrecidos, logrando cooptar y subordinar a los Estados a sus designios a travésde las grandes...

There is a growing consensus in social sciences that there is a need for interdisciplinary research on the complexity of human behavior. At an age of crisis for both the economy and economic theory, economics is called upon to fruitfully cooperate with contiguous social disciplines. The term ‘economics imperialism’ refers to the expansion of economics to territories that lie outside the traditional domain of the discipline. Its critics argue that in starting with the assumption of maximizing...

With the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of illiberalism in the aftermath of the global financial crisis we need a theoretical framework that links modernization, crises and the fate of democracy. In my paper I attempt to show that Polanyi’s thinking represents such a framework. I focus on Polanyi’s historically informed political economic analysis of the tensions between liberal finance and liberal democracy. In the first section I reconstruct Polanyi’s political...