Your search

Karl Polanyi started his career as a doctor of law and practiced law for a while; but he did not become a legal scholar. As an economic historian, anthropologist, or sociologist, he was concerned with the relation of economy and society. But even though law is an important factor in mediating this relationship, Polanyi gave little attention to the law as such. As part of an endeavour to advance a ‘Polanyian’ economic sociology of law, this article develops the ‘law of market society’ as an...

This article advances research on 'neoliberal legality' to focus on the role of courts in response to neoliberal crime prevention approaches. Drawing on Karl Polanyi's analysis of embeddedness in market capitalism, along with criminological research on the penal state, we analyse three case studies reflecting central crime prevention approaches of the neoliberal era in the United States. We find that neoliberal legality is more complex than simply legitimating or resisting neoliberal...

The Democratic Party's current left-wing resurgence shows that significant popular support exists for an expanded vision of fundamental rights for all people: rights to public health care and higher education; affordable housing; living-wage jobs; and a Green New Deal that transitions human society to ecological sustainability while also reducing inequality. But what are the best institutional means to provide this expanded vision of fundamental rights? This paper argues that we must stop...

According to the economic analysis of law, an efficient property regime is premised on the universality, the exclusivity, and the transferability of property rights. Ideally then, every (legal) person can enjoy the status of an owner and any (economic) resource can become private property; ownership titles could be bought and sold across national jurisdictions and would ultimately be respected everywhere in the world. Throughout history, property regimes indeed seem to have moved towards...

This article captures China's role in global manufacturing through the prism of conceptualisation of the commodification of labour power in Marxist theory. It argues that modalities of China's labour force co-optation in assembly and lower value added production for export of consumer goods to advanced economies carries more of a family resemblance with putting-out systems of the pre- capitalist era than with the commodification of labour power sensu stricto marking the capitalist era from...

In his seminal 1944 book The Great Transformation, Polanyi describes the rise and fall of liberal capitalism during the long nineteenth century. Many have realised that Polanyi has a lot to tell about the European Union in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The paper begins with an overview of Polanyi's historiography of the failure of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism and his account of the four elements that helped liberal capitalism thrive, while precipitating its collapse-the...

M. Sornarajah's recent analysis of investment arbitration as an offshoot of 'neoliberalism' is basically correct. But it attaches too much importance to the bias of the arbitrators and the procedural problems in arbitral practice. The controversy over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and investment arbitration generally is not about the niceties of arbitral procedure, the discretion of arbitrators or the pros and cons of the...

A literary criticism of the book "Lawyers' Empire: Legal Professions and Cultural Authority" by Canadian lawyer W. Wesley Pue is presented. It outlines economic historian Karl Polanyi's assumption of Great Transformation in Western Europe that made the period of Pue's book long. It examines lawyers being innovators in Canada.

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord marked a significant shift in global climate governance which has been substantially adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. At Copenhagen, binding targets for states to reduce emissions were replaced by voluntary pledges. We argue that the Polanyian 'double movement' offers a useful lens to understand the Copenhagen shift in global climate governance as part of ongoing contestation in the international law system between principles of economic liberalisation and...

The rise of for-profit law schools in the United States highlights the interplay of political and moral economy in the reproduction of legal expertise. This article offers ethnographic evidence from one ABA-accredited for-profit law school pseudonymously labeled New Delta School of Law. The article posits New Delta as a case study in market fundamentalism of the kind first theorized by Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi. Polanyi defined global capital as a “double movement” between free...

The issue of whether transnational risk can be regulated through a social sphere goes to the heart of what John Ruggie has described as 'embedded liberalism': how capitalist countries have reconciled markets with the social community that markets require to survive and thrive. This collection, located in the wider debates about global capitalism and its regulation, tackles the challenge of finding a way forward for regulation. It rejects the old divisions of state and market, citizens and...

This article considers Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as part of the projects in ‘new governance and decentred regulation’, which draw social forces towards the regulation of economic behaviour. It uses Karl Polanyi to open up pertinent interfaces between society and economy for observation, and Gunther Teubner to substantiate a ‘regulatory’ view of the company's social relationships. The article finds that CSR combines movements for the recognition of social relationships, on an...

The current crisis in Europe recalls the theory and practice of authoritarian liberalism, the idea that in order to protect economic liberalism and respect for fiscal discipline, representative democracy must be curtailed. This configuration was first identified by Hermann Heller in late Weimar as a response to the imperative to maintain the ideological separation of state and economy and presented by Karl Polanyi as conditioned by broader geo-political pressure to maintain the gold standard...

EXCERPT [KM]: Karl Polanyi has experienced a renaissance in recent years.13 We refer to his work in our remarks on the failures of the European project for three interrelated reasons: (1) Polanyi has underlined that modern markets were not generated by some evolutionary process but established by political planning.14 Europe's “internal market project” is the best conceivable confirmation of his thesis. (2) One of the most important insights of his work concerns the “social embeddedness” of...

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour...

Underpinning this article is the proposition that regional integration with a social dimension has the potential to engender a more equitable pattern of globalisation. The empirical focus of the article is on the ex)tent to which the insights of 'embedded liberalism' associated with regional economic integration between he industrialised nations of the European Union (EU)can be applied to regional economic integration within sub-SaharanAfrica. The article contends that EU market...

This thesis proposes a new counter-narrative to the neo-liberal agenda that combines two seemingly disparate bodies of work: New Governance and Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice. New Governance is a new and rapidly growing strand of legal thought and practi ce that has simultaneously developed a following in Europe and the United States. In short, legal scholars in this field of research are advocating a shift away from long-standing command-style, fixed-rule regulation toward more...