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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...

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...

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 introduction unpacks the key question that informs the articles in this special issue. How does a social sphere inform regulation and, more specifically, how can the regulatory capacity of a social sphere be har-nessed, as an alternative or significant complementary force to state reg-ulation and reliance on the self-regulatory capacity of markets? This question is salient and topical also in light of the search for new regula-tory strategies and perspectives in the aftermath of the...

This article starts from the assumption that economic sociology, including Karl Polanyi's work, can contribute fresh perspectives to regulation debates because it opens up new understandings of the nature of economic activity, a key target of legal regulation. In particular this article examines Polanyi's idea that society drives regulation. For Polanyi the "regulatory counter-movement" is society's response to the disembedding -- in particular through the proliferation of markets -- of...

This article develops Polanyi's (2001) theme of harnessing the regula-tory capacity of a social sphere by focusing on trust as an emotion for framing risk regulatory regimes. Using the global mining sector as its focus, it explores the role of trust in the regulation and corporate man-agement of social and environmental risk Sociological perspectives on trust are employed to identify and analyze dynamics of trust in the mining industry. The article draws on data col-lected between 2004 and...

The social protests ort the streets of indebted sovereigns in crises across the Eurozone have made debt restructuring an imperative. Further delay in achieving this expeditiously and equitably significantly exacerbates the social costs of crises from which current and future generations will struggle to recover. This article examines the feasibility of the drastic and widespread debt restructuring needed to resolve the problem in the face of existing private law sanctions that protect...