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This article examines the use of competition as an object and mode of governance. It first considers how competition might become a principle of economic organization and, relatedly, how it may become part of state projects and practices. Second, it comments on the discursive and material dimensions of competition, considering it as a social construct and as a social constraint. Third, it examines the rather idealized representations of competition in the broader doxa of liberalism and...

The grip of austerity in European politics since 2008 presents a double puzzle: electorally weak center-left parties offering no definite alternative, and the surprisingly efficient pursuit of “fiscal consolidation”. To understand this double puzzle this article investigates the institutional bases of alternative economic thinking during the 1930s versus the post-2008 crisis years. Noting the recent prominence of a new social type, the European economist-technocrat (eet), I highlight the...

This article seeks to use Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, to understand the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Polanyi's basic premise was that a great crisis must result from powerful causes. He argued that the crisis of the 1930s was a consequence of three distinct processes: deep imbalances in the global trading system, a crisis within the global financial mechanism that was supposed to manage those imbalances, and a failure of adaptation...

Polanyi offers a powerful vision of a “great transformation” that will reverse the subordination of society to the economy and reassert the primacy of social protection in the context of modern society. Pursuit of the great transformation is one way of conceptualizing the quest for “development” in the positive sense of ecologically sustainable human flourishing. This paper explores how the contemporary interaction of national and global political dynamics affects the trajectory of Polanyi's...

The state incentivizes investors to entrust capital to public corporations by granting shareholders enforceable rights over managers. However, these rights create legal “access points” through which social movements can make nonpecuniary claims on the corporation. I use original historical research on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s administration of federal securities law to show that concern over nonpecuniary claims motivates the state to enact the role of “market protector.” In...

Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation is a classic... it has come to be recognized as a founding charter for economic sociology. It anticipated major accomplishments of late-twentieth-century social science (including, among others, Ben Bernanke’s studies of the Great Depression and Amartya Sen’s work on famine). Its core problems—how do societies respond to globalization? how do they address the risks of market failure?—are central to contemporary macrosociology. It is probably time...

Evolution of the Property Relation defines an approach to economics which is centered around the concept of property and explores the historical evolution of the relationship of the individual, private property, and the state, and the distinctive changes wrought by the emergence of the market.

This article looks at the issue of political disengagement in mature democracies and the growing tendency towards disconnect between citizens and their political representatives. It locates itself in relation to 'demand-side' (external to politics) and critical 'supply-side' (focused on the political centre) explanations of disengagement. It concentrates on the latter and, accordingly, builds on critical, post-Marxist and elite-oriented work. As such it follows on from earlier calls in the...

The paper analyzes interdependence of the market sphere which functions according to the logic of contract, and the sphere of non-market activity within economy, where the logic of gift dominates as a paradigm. The purpose of the analysis is to present how the above concepts of societal exchange intertwine and complete each other within the socio-economic order. This is followed by the description of 'pre-market' economic paradigms (based on Karl Polanyi's contribution) such as reciprocity,...

To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it. In other words, inequality is not just something external to us, but also invades our own world. I begin, therefore, by examining the global community of sociology through the lens of inequality. I then consider two recent perspectives on our unequal world from outside sociology: the moral radicalism of...

Capitalist economic development has occurred unevenly, as certain economies began sustained growth relatively early, opening up an increasingly large gap with lagging countries. This well-known fact has encouraged much research on the prospects for undeveloped economies to "catch up" to the earlier developers. Japan and Russia in the late nineteenth century were two of the first countries outside of western Europe to experience substantial catch-up growth. Beginning in the 1860s, political...

Drawing upon The Great Transformation (1944), we outline Karl Polanyi's environmental sociology by presenting his major insights on economic substantivism, fictitious commodities, and double movements. Polanyi wrote his opus in challenge to Von Mises' Austrian School of Economics and its pursuit of an autonomous, self-regulating global free market. Polanyi's recognized the social and environmental limits of a fully free market and reasoned that inevitable market excesses would result in the...

This paper addresses what labor movement scholars are calling the "Polanyi-problem" - how societal movements can effectively re-embed neoliberal markets back into society - by drawing upon recent interpretations of Karl Marx writings on primitive accumulation and class formation. The author focuses on the case of Colombia's coffee farmers (cafeteros) - a class of producers whose historically-privileged modality of class reproduction was undermined by the liberalization of the coffee market...

This article discusses why many social scientists including Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, and Karl Marx are dissatisfied with an overreliance on markets, and a conceptualization of markets being efficient, fair and rational. Topics include five types of arguments critical of markets including the Marxian approach to markets, the rise of Karl Polanyi's view that markets are fragile, and a more complex decision-making approach starting with Max Weber's view of social action.

Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear political theory. It develops this argument by first assessing and critiquing the changing nature of political science and its account of contemporary...

KM - A book review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century that points out the glaring omission of Polanyi.

KM: Book review of "From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization"

The work of Karl Polanyi has gained in influence in recent years to become a point of reference to a wide range of leading authors in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and social policy. Newly available in paperback, this volume is a combination of reflections on, and assessment of, the nature of Polanyi's contribution and new strands of work, both theoretical and empirical, that has been inspired by Polanyi's insights. It gathers together the key contributions to the first ever...

This study develops a Polanyian perspective on income inequality in advanced capitalist countries. Polanyi's historical account of the rise and fall of classic liberalism in Britain illustrated how social groups and society at large devised "protective institutions" to shield themselves from socially destructive market forces. Recent qualitative applications of this idea identify three protective institutions as being the most important - the public sector economy, trade unions, and the...