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The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of European economic and monetary integration, one...

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) est surtout connu pour son livre The Great Transformation, et en particulier pour une idée contenue dans celui-ci : la distinction entre une « économie intégrée dans les relations sociales » et « des relations sociales intégrées dans le système économique ». Selon cet auteur, les activités économiques et techniques  n’étaient d’abord qu’une des nombreuses excroissances des activités humaines. L’économie archaïque a donc été au service des besoins humains. Mais, au...

This article discusses digitalization and its connection with the political economy of transformation. Its point of departure is Karl Polanyi's historical analysis as presented in The Great Transformation. Polanyi analyzed the development of “self-regulating” markets—with transformative and destructive consequences for individuals, nature, and society—and government efforts to contain these consequences. Polanyi's perspective is compared to Marx's theorem of the development of productive...

Resumo Explorando as distinções conceituais entre mercado, sistema de mercados formadores de preço e praça de mercado, concebidas por Karl Polanyi, o artigo mostra a pertinência dessas diferenças para a análise do capitalismo contemporâneo, ao focalizar a caracterização e os efeitos específicos de praças de mercado da atualidade. Evoca a contribuição de Polanyi para repensar o conceito de mercado tal como referido na literatura econômica e especificar a historicidade dos mercados, sobretudo...

Resumo Uma introdução à entrevista realizada com Gareth Dale (Brunel University) − economista político e especialista na trajetória e na obra de Karl Polanyi − e a um conjunto de textos inspirados na abordagem polanyiana publicados neste número de S&A. Recupera questões-chave apresentadas na entrevista e na obra de Dale, dando relevo à literatura recente produzida sobre o autor, à contínua e difundida relevância das ideias de Polanyi para a compreensão do capitalismo e da democracia, e a uma...

Resumo O artigo explora conflitos entre a indústria florestal, as comunidades Mapuche e o Estado chileno à luz da leitura de Polanyi sobre a expansão capitalista. Oferece análise histórico-institucional das maneiras pelas quais o Estado chileno usou a florestação para domar uma fronteira selvagem e os povos nativos que ali vivem. Argumenta que o aumento da violência nessa zona responde à crescente militarização do Estado na área e reflete o contramovimento de proteção social iniciado pelo...

This paper assesses the contribution of Karl Polanyi, a theorist largely ignored in fascism scholarship, toward understanding fascism’s interwar rise and present-day implications. In exploring Polanyi’s work in The Great Transformation and lesser-known and unpublished writings, a sophisticated and largely original conception of fascism emerges, rooted in the idea of ‘anti-individualism’ as its foundational trait. Polanyi accounts for fascism’s philosophical content, ideological plasticity,...

Karl Polanyi’s scholarship is interpreted in radically different ways. The “hard” reading of Polanyi sees him as a radical socialist; the “soft” reading presents him as a theorist of mixed economy. This article sides with the soft interpretation. It uses Polanyi’s biography to explain his theoretical “elusiveness,” presents a novel interpretation of his three types of economic integration, claiming all economies are “mixed.” While it acknowledges Polanyi as one of the major sources of world...

For Karl Polanyi, the economic system cannot be analyzed in isolation from social institutions. The economicism fallacy neglects social variables that are fundamental for determining economic action and systemic transformations. This implies that the rise of the self-regulated market system and its dominance over social institutions are not a natural movement when analyzed in the light of the entire history of human societies. For the author, what happened was a kind of uprooting of the...

This application of Polanyi to the question of fascism’s resurgence provides an important corrective to mainstream liberal explanations (e.g., Albright 2018), inviting the reader to “look up rather than down” (Lim 2021) by tying fascism’s significance to the functioning of the capitalist system rather than to the personalities of fascist politicians or their degree of mass support. The merits of this notwithstanding, I argue that current Polanyian treatments have neglected to engage with a...

Twenty-first-century Brazil’s political evolution is a window on the dynamics of contemporary political transitions. The inability of Brazil’s Workers’ Party to sustain its social democratic project and the subsequent rise of the reactionary regime of Jair Bolsonaro are, in turn, part of a global pattern of political change. Karl Polanyi’s vision of the ‘double movement,’ in which the dominance of the market vies with the countervailing movement for social protection, offers an analytical...

본 논문은 최근 대중적 관심을 불러일으키는 사회적경제를 주목하여 그 이론적 기원을 탐색하기 위한 목적을 가지고 있다. 이 작업은 다수의 연구자들과 활동가들에게 사회적경제에 대한 이해의 지평을 넓히고 보다 풍부하게 사회적경제에 대한 접근의 근거를 제공할 것이다. 다양한 분야에서 어려움에 직면하고 있는 우리 사회의 현실을 감안할 때, 새로운 대안경제로 사회적경제의 타당성 차원에서도 필요한 작업이다. 실제로, 기존 경제학은 합리적인 인간을 전제로 자기조정적인 시장메커니즘에 의한 이윤 극대화논리를 발전시켜 왔다. 가격을 매개로 시장의 무오류적 완결성을 고착해 온 것이다. 그러나 시장이 적절하게 기능하지 못하고 정부의 개입에 의해 해결되지 못한 다양한 사회문제들에 직면하면서 인간의 발전과 자연의 성숙을 도모하는 새로운 사회적경제의 가능성이 중시되고 있는 실정이다. 이러한 관점에서 본 연구는 주류경제학의 오류와 현대 경제에 대한 폴라니의 비판을 근저에 두고 그가 주목했던 두 명의 혁신적...

The importance of the work of Karl Polanyi to social enterprise scholarship is often maintained. However, explanations as to how and why his ideas are so relevant to the field are still relatively scarce. In this essay, we argue that engaging with Polanyi’s work directly, and Polanyian scholarship more widely, can provide a deep understanding of the underlying assumptions within current social enterprise conceptualizations, and provide insights into how the relative positioning of market and...

In North America, uranium workers are fighting for their right to participate in a free-market system that provides them with small personal benefits. These workers experience powerlessness, instability, and unpredictability – or social dislocation – by living amidst capitalism’s polluted ecosystems, unstable economies, and disintegrating communities. However, they feel reliant on uranium for their livelihoods and strongly support the industry’s renewal and form sites of acceptance to...

Drawing on a detailed analysis of Grabher and König’s study of platformization (Grabher & König, 2020), this essay develops a revision of Actor-Network Theory by proposing how a Device, Representation, Actor and Network or a DRAN Approach can be more helpful in making sense of platform economic processes. First, it locates the ways in which Grabher & König’s article approach platforms from an updated Polanyian perspective. Second, it elaborates on how the aforementioned article...

The concept of “Polanyi’s momentµ should be applied not only to point out some general analogy between today’s economic and social crisis and the one which occurred between the two World Wars and provoked the breakdown of European liberal society. In fact, Polanyi’s work allows us to hypothesize a much deeper continuity between the two crises, where both represent different stages of the same interregnum, the same process of institutional metamorphosis. It hereby helps us to decode the deep...

Synthesizing material derived from Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, in Part I the concept of “national character” is delineated as a special case of “habitus” relating to the socio-spatial scale of the nation state. In relation to problems of state-formation, national character is shown to be a figurational and co-developmental function of the system of nation-states in which patterns of mutual identification and “imagined...

The paper is an application of the economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi to contemporary rural Hungary. After addressing the influence of Polanyi’s critique of market society and his standing in the discipline of anthropology, the main focus is the community of Tázlár on the Danube-Tisza interfluve. The paper traces the history of the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land and labour in this relatively isolated settlement, which was not fully integrated into the national society until the...