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The SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the associated COVID-19 pandemic, is perhaps the greatest threat to life, and lifestyles, the world has known in more than a century. The scholarship included here provides critical insights into the ethics and ideologies, inequalities, and changed social understandings that lie at the heart of this pandemic. This volume maps out the ways in which the pandemic has impacted (most often disproportionately) societies, the successes and failures of means used to combat...
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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...
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Though Polanyi referred to three distinct fictitious commodities, one, money, and the fate of the apex structure that commodified it, the gold standard, structured The Great Transformation’s narrative. Despite this centrality of money and its commodification to Polanyi’s masterwork, there is near-deafening silence in Polanyi scholarship on money as a fictitious commodity. This chapter ends it. It traces Polanyi’s understanding of fictitious commodities to its sources in classical political...
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This introduction places the contributions that follow in the context of Polanyi’s rising influence, its causes and effects, and of the key twenty-first century developments that make his oeuvre more relevant than ever. It emphasizes how the contributions push the boundaries of received understandings of Polanyi. While some contributions fill gaping holes, such as those on money as a fictitious commodity, others overturn received understandings, whether that of the double movement or...
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In these remarkably stirring reflections, delivered at the 2014 conference from which most of the contributions to this volume emerge, the late Abe Rotstein, Polanyi’s student and collaborator, recalls the projected sequel to The Great Transformation, to be titled Freedom and Technology. Whereas the former was built on a social sciences approach using institutional analysis, the sequel was to follow the intention Hegel expressed in the words ‘Wir die religiöse Vorstellung in Gedanken fassen’...
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In the last decades, Karl Polanyi has gained recognition as one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century. His seminal book, The Great Transformation, is listed among twentieth- century classics. How can this book, written more than seventy-five years ago, be applied to the current conditions? In order to answer this question the chapter not only compares the civilization of the nineteenth century in Europe with our own epoch. It also reconstructs some of Polanyi’s...
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This chapter argues that Karl Polanyi’s economic sociology offers foundational concepts for a radical analysis of the social and ecological conditions that have caused the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, it shows that Polanyi’s work, often claimed for social democracy, has the potential to provide much more radical insights into the question as to how to “re-embed” our economies, thereby leading to a fundamental rethinking about the ways in which the present crisis can be overcome.