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Abstract:  This essay's point of departure is the coincident economic and environmental “crises” of our time. I locate both in the dynamics of capital accumulation on a world-scale, drawing on the ideas of Marx, Karl Polanyi and James O’Connor. I ask whether the recent profusion of “crisis talk” in the public domain presents an opportunity for progressive new ideas to take hold now that “neoliberalism” has seemingly been de-legitimated. My answer is that a “post-neoliberal” future is...

Per Google Books: This is a scholarly and erudite work. . . There is a wealth of detail, all illustrated with plenty of fascinating examples. . . It is impossible to give the full flavour of this thoughtful and stimulating book in even a long review, but it deserves to be

The development economist Dani Rodrik recently declared that “the globalization consensus is dead”. The claim has momentus implications, because this consensus has steered economic policy around the world for the past quarter century. It emanates from the heartland of neoclassical economics, and defines the central tasks of the Washington-based organizations which claim to speak for the world. This essay answers two main questions. First, is Rodrik's claim true, and by what measures of...

Recent academic discourse and European social policies highlight the (potential) effectiveness of social economy practices as a means to address social exclusion especially for the more disadvantaged social groups. Apart from terminological debates on the aforementioned troubled concepts, fundamental questions needs to be examined: To what extent social economy practices flourish as a result of policy shifts towards further commercialization of public social services or to what extent...

The crisis of the institutions of liberal capitalism dates back to the last decades of the nineteenth century. Economics was thenceforth forced to radically reconsider its achievements and even its basic presuppositions, to the extent that they were linked to a free-market and perfect-competition model.

Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi's ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the...

KM: We want to bring to the attention of English readers some currents of economic theory and practice that have flourished in non-Anglophone countries over the last two decades, particularly in France, Brazil, Hispanic America and Scandinavia. To these we have added significant work by English-speaking authors that was sidelined during neoliberalism’s heyday and deserves to find a wider audience now. We have brought these strands of new thinking together under the umbrella concept of ‘the...

In a recent article, Caporaso and Tarrow have argued that the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is increasingly moving in a social policy direction that will ultimately put European politics on a “Polanyian” course. We take issue with their claim and distinguish three dimensions of European economic and social integration: market-correcting integration, market-enforcing integration, and the creation of a European area of nondiscrimination, the latter consisting of two...

This paper examines the extent to which one manifestation of neoliberal transnational legality, represented by the investment rules regime, may be vulnerable to critical resistance in the post-recession environment. If the regime was experiencing a crisis of legitimacy before the global recession set in, it might now be portrayed as having broken down entirely. This paper argues, in contrast, that the regime has a constitution-like resiliency that is intended to adapt and last far beyond the...

I examine Fair Trade (FT) as a social movement that emerges as a regulative force in response to the rise of neoliberalism. I apply Polanyi's (1944, 1957) classic concepts of embeddedness and the double movement to understand the conflict that arises within a coherently motivated social movement. Using interview and participant observation data along with content analysis of FT organization mission statements, this research examines the role of conflict within the FT movement over how best...

This article analyzes the development of “local food” institutions from a social movements perspective. Over the last decade, institutions that “shorten the links” between producer and consumer have developed through a diverse collaboration of many social sectors (farmers, agronomic experts, retailers, chefs, food writers, and several distinct consumer sectors). Some agronomists and rural sociologists critical of the globalization and industrialization of agriculture have recognized this...

Fair trade banana farming in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean has emerged since the late 1990s in response to a crisis. Rulings by the World Trade Organization ended a longstanding trade dispute between the US and the EU by eliminating a system of preferential access of Windward Island bananas to the UK market. What followed was a period of rapid decline in banana exports from these small islands and a widespread abandonment of banana cultivation. Those banana farmers who remain are now...

Karl Polanyi is considered one of the most prominent social scientists of the 20th century. In his writings, an important concern was the relationship between the markets and the society (therefore, the state) as a whole; to discuss it, he introduced the concept of "embeddedness", fundamental for his study of the origins and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. An important part of his heritage is the study of the economic history of what he called "ancient societies," especially of...

The core economic functions of production and distribution of goods can be handled by many different methods. After the fall of communism, the market mechanism has become nearly universal. Conventional economic theories argue that this is natural, because it is the best and the most efficient method for organizing economic affairs in a society. This paper, based on the analysis of Polanyi (1944) and Klein (2008) argues that the opposite is true. Market mechanisms conflict with natural...

The paper aims to examine Karl Polanyi's view of market evolution in the context of the emergence of a national grain market in China's transition economy. The dataset used includes information about inter-provincial grain trade on China's grain market from November 1999 to October 2000. A priori blockmodelling method is used for hypothesis testing. This paper finds that a partially integrated national grain market had emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century in China in spite of...