Your search

Abstract: Mirowski''s justification for replacing the foundational principles of neoclassical economics – methodological individualism and rational choice theory – with a theoretical framework informed by cybernetics, information theory, and computational biology, is subject to a critique informed by the work of Karl Polanyi, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Mirowski''s proposed alterative is called into question on the basis of two crucial weaknesses. First there is Mirowksi''s penchant...

The article examines the renewed interest in heterodox political economy. Institutionalists, post Keynesians, neo-Marxists, and feminists among others, and various sub-groups provide schools of thought on heterodoxy. The guidelines of institutional-evolutionary political economy (IEPE) are offered alongside socioeconomic analysis and complexity theories. The author outlines the conflict of individual v. structure. Other topics covered include social capital, heterogeneous agents, financial...

Argentina constitutes a revealing textbook case of the link between the liberal utopia of an auto-regulated market, commodity fetishism and economists' theories. How does economic liberalisation, backed by a law on currency convertibility, resolve the crisis of political representation affecting the country since the emergence of Peronism, the «voice of the voiceless», in the 1940s? The liberal utopia of markets' auto-regulation associates taking root in social life with having money, by...

Using Karl Polanyi's analysis of the separation of politics and the economy, the book argues that the market economy is not a spontaneous process, but a...

Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists,...

The postwar reconstruction of domestic and international orders ushered in a new political economy of capitalism. It entailed a far-reaching reorganization of social relations and economic institutions and accorded to the state an important role in the management of the economy. Many of the institutions of classical liberalism were displaced by interventionist mechanisms. The welfare state consolidated and extended multifarious forms of protection accorded to labor. A new level of...

"L'hypothèse de l'article est la suivante : il n'est pas possible de parler rigoureusement d'un concept de « marché » en science économique, car ce concept est en réalité une notion floue, au mieux ambivalente. En revanche, le recours à d'autres sciences sociales, comme l'histoire et la sociologie, peuvent aider à la construction d'un concept de marché. Ainsi, le travail de Karl Polanyi et les travaux d'historiens contemporains, notamment ceux d'Alain Guéry, semblent utiles pour mieux...

INTRO: This paper is a plea for greater cognizance of the errors of omission and commission committed by mainstream health economics, and the potential orientation in treating health and health care as (metaphorical) commodities that the unfettered influence of health economics may be prompting. Economic criticisms of mainstream health economics are evident, especially in the collection edited by John Davis (2001), but tend to be rather fragmented and lacking in credibility with our...

Cet article porte sur le « processus économique institué » de Karl Polanyi. Il s’appuie sur certains de ses écrits moins connus, qui précèdent et suivent la publication en anglais de la Grande Transformation, dans lesquels Polanyi insistait en particulier sur la capacité des individus et des collectivités à agir sur leur propre destinée. Ces écrits nous aident à conceptualiser les processus de transformation institutionnelle qui caractérisent la société contemporaine. Cet article s’intéresse...

This paper is an attempt at developing an analytical framework that could be helpful to understand the unstable character of the capitalist society, by drawing upon the work of four important thinkers: Marx, Weber, Schumpeter, and Polanyi. It is argued that all four share a similar vision towards capitalism, and that they are all indispensable for the thesis that the working of capitalism undermines its own institutional structure, and thus make the reproduction of the capitalist society a...

Whereas a largely conveyed standard reading of The Great Transformation lets one think that Karl Polanyi establishes the effective birth certificate of a self-regulated market at the nineteenth century in the West, this text suggests that The Great Transformation makes Polanyi the author of a criticism of the theoretical fiction of the self-regulated market, and the historian of this acting fiction which directs individual behaviors and transforms in-depth the Western societies of the...

This article argues for the continuing relevance of Fred Hirsch's The Social Limits to Growth (1976), valued as a critical analysis of the consequences of markets on the moral fabric of society. Two concepts that are fundamental to Hirsch—the commercialization bias and the depleting moral legacy—will be scrutinised. We further claim that this book, by emphasizing the tendency to market expansion and the corresponding commodification of increasing spheres of social life, while simultaneously...

This chapter examines Karl Polanyi's critique of formalism in economics and his case for a more institutional economics based upon a reconstitution of the facts of economic life on as wide an historical basis as possible. The argument below reviews Polanyi's argument with regard to the relation between economic anthropology and comparative economics, the contrast between the formalist and substantive approaches to economic analysis, the notion of an economistic fallacy, the most important...

"L'expression "économie de la connaissance" a, en ce début du XXIe siècle définitivement remplacé celle, très en vogue à la fin des années 1990, de "nouvelle économie". Les sociétés les plus avancées auraient désormais atteint un nouveau stade du développement économique dont la connaissance serait le facteur essentiel. Cette idée laisse supposer que jusque-là, celle-ci ne jouait qu'un rôle secondaire dans le processus productif. L'auteur se propose d'expliquer le sens et les implications...

Recently Claus Offe has put the question that concerns the fate of the European model of social capitalism: can the model of social capitalism survive the European integration in the context of certain contemporary tendencies? Offe has presupposed that the mentioned model is challenged by the processes of globalisation and the integration of the post socialist countries into the European Union. The working hypothesis of the article is that there is an opportunity to provide a coherent answer...

The effects of commercialised health care in embedding, exacerbating and legitimating social and economic inequality are at the root of widespread and recurrent resistance to commercialisation in health. In low income developing countries suffering generalised poverty, and notably in Sub-Saharan Africa, liberalisation of largely unregulated clinical provision has created a substantially informalised, fee-for-service primary health sector which is exclusionary, low quality and under stress....

The term world-economy in our title must have already given a hint to the careful reader of our purpose in writing this paper: We intend to bridge institutional economics with world-systems analysis in order to enhance the global applicability of the former. World-economy is a term used by Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein and means a space defined by the existence of a single division of labor (coexistent with multiple States) whereas world economy would indicate the arithmetic...

KM translate: The volume aims to provide a contribution to the knowledge of the ways of birth and consolidation of the sociological discourse on the economy, at work and their transformations connected to the process of industrialization. The goal, mainly educational, is pursued through the analysis of the contributions that Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, Frederick Taylor and Elton Mayo have offered in this regard. The treatment of these authors, whose...