Your search

This article illustrates the continuing salience of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944) by employing two of its central concepts, fictitious commodities and the double movement to interpret the globalisation countermovement and one of its most important figures, José Bové. I explain the transformation of José Bové from rural sheep farmer to French folk hero and global activist and analyse the extent to which his rhetoric and political actions are congruent with Polanyi's key...

The rise and fall of the New Middle East (NME) cannot be separated from wider global developments and must therefore be studied in relation to them, in both their ideational and material aspects. The ideological background of the NME has drawn upon the ideology of globalization and shares its underlying tenets of rationality, professionalism and virtues of market economy. In the early 1990s a discourse of globalization was set in motion, highlighting economic and technological development...

The debate about so-called economic globalization has reached a new phase. The hegemony of neo-liberal thinking has ended, in the face of both the increased and increasingly effective resistance to the social consequences of neo-liberal market-making - rising inequality and insecurity throughout the world - and the visibly dysfunctional effects of lack of regulation - currency and stock market crashes, among others. Thus, the story about 'the rise and fall of market society', which was first...

Human life cannot be reduced to market transactions and human beings cannot only be treated as economic actors. When the power of the market increases, human beings will always try to protect themselves. Given the differences that exist in social and cultural traditions, these protective responses are likely to differ from one society to the other. This is why, even in a global market, diversity is always likely to persist. This book investigates the question of economic globalization -...

BOOK ABSTRACT: Despite a burgeoning debate on substantive issues in IPE, little attention has been devoted to its theoretical foundations. In this important new text, Matthew Watson reviews the main current theoretical approaches to IPE and highlights the problems that arise from treating 'states' and 'markets' as separate and contesting units of analysis. Foremost among these problems is the lack of attention given to theorizing the constitution of the individual as both an economic agent...

This article examines the movement ATTAC and assesses its potential to function as a vital part of the emerging global opposition to neoliberal globalization. We analyze the agenda of the movement and assess its coherence, both in terms of policy evaluations and prescriptions and in terms of the fit of the movement's organizational structure with its substantive mission and official aims. To this end, we explain the emergence and stellar rise of the movement, compare the particularly...

Globalization is often portrayed as a new and unique phenomenon to our times. However, the dependence of American society upon global markets is not new. American Populists of the 19th century faced a similar matrix of political economic constraints. The Populists faced such challenges as the expansion of international trade, a deflationary international monetary order, integrating global capital markets, dependence on credit, and a political system unable to effectively regulate economic...

International Relations and the Problem of Difference has developed out of the sense that IR as a discipline does not assess the quality of cultural interactions that shape, and are shaped by, the changing structures and processes of the international system. In this work, the authors re-imagine IR as a uniquely placed site for the study of differences as organized explicitly around the exploration of the relation of wholes and parts and sameness and difference-and always the one in relation...

This multidisciplinary volume presents a refreshing new approach to environmental values in the global age. it investigates the challenges that globalization poses to traditional environmental values in general as well as in politics and international governance.Divided into five parts, the book investigates how environmental values could be reconceived in a globalizing world.Part I explores contemporary environmental values and their implications for a globalizing world.Part II examines the...

This article outlines what the Polanyi problem consists of and provides information on some of the implications that arise in developing a Gramscian/Polanyian strategy of counter-hegemony for the labor and the modern social movements, as of August 2004. Labor and new social movements are allegedly an integral element for a progressive solution of the so-called Polanyi problem, which is how the tendency towards the creation of a global free-market economy can be reconciled with a degree of...

Karl Polanyi's analysis in The Great Transformation has played a prominent role in shaping our understanding of the nature and outcome of both globalization and the movements that have emerged to resist it. However, this article argues that Polanyi's account of the rise and demise of Europe's 19th-century market system is, in important respects, incomplete and misleading. Its central concern is Polanyi's neglect of class structures and processes and how this leads him to mischaracterize both...

The article review three books about the role of the state in promoting development. It includes "Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies," by Robert Bates, "Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation," by Peter Evans and "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time," by Karl Polanyi.

Europe continues to search for its - "European" - social model and the search seems to become increasingly urgent. It is no longer just the "democratic deficit", but also and alongside it, the "social deficit" of the EU which needs to be cured. That new concern is, in fact, a rejection of the older answers. According to the ordo-liberal interpretation of the European legal order as an "Economic Constitution" and, successively, in the analyses of the EU as a "Regulatory State", the sphere of...

Ideology is always for something. Who thought neoliberalism was any different? The post-Cold War provides an excellent laboratory in which to observe 20th c. civilization crumbling, even as it marches towards world markets unbounded by law or social principles. Through repetition and rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the market has robbed the state and thus the polis of its agency. Thus, Schroeder’s SPD is contemplating yet another retreat from the social democratic model, in favor of the...

In the wake of frank neo-liberalism, and in the context of rising security fears, ways are being found to provide market liberalism with a more inclusive face. The Poverty Reduction Strategies currently prominent in international development, and Thirdway OECD 'Social Inclusion' policy frames claim common purpose to promote 'opportunity, empowerment and security' for people and places on the peripheries of global economies and societies. They share commitments to global economic integration...

Bringing together democratic theory and international political economy literatures, I begin with the thesis that economic globalization is undermining the embedded liberalism of the post WWII era. Embodied in the Keynsian welfare state, embedded liberalism held out democratic avenues for disaffected groups to hold political actors responsible for suffering induced by market forces. Transformations in the global economy, however, constrain the options available to governments and curtail...

The current understanding of U.S. hegemony rests on the assumptions of neoclassical theories of both the state and the market. While the service-dominated economy is considered post- Fordist, the rhetoric of the state focuses on institutions of democracy. To what extent is our understanding of democracy dependent on the prior assumptions that the economy is ‘free’? If we reexamine the assumptions about the links between state and economy, drawing on the work of Gramsci, and Polanyi...

Examines a neoconservative-religious right nexus that has emerged in and around the Bush White House. Discussion on the work of Karl Polanyi to examine a paradoxical tension that exists between U.S. nationalism and the promotion of a free-market economy; Family values nationalism and free market capitalism; Proposed two areas of critique that have been influenced by the work of Christian realists.

This paper will explore the linkages and contradictions between the promotion of democracy and the application of economic and political conditionality in Southern Africa, with particular reference to Zambia. Many electoral democracies have emerged in Africa in the last decade in conjunction with and partially as a consequence of the conditions applied to loans by bilateral and multilateral donors. It will be argued that the process of conditionality and the neoliberal policies applied...

This article presents information related to market transactions. As a mode of organization, markets are so pervasive in our own lives that it may be hard to think just how novel and contingent (in geologic time) they may be. It was economist Karl Polanyi who sought to isolate a juncture in this process of "becoming a market", the point at which the idea of the market transaction becomes not just a tool or an instrument, but a central organizing principle of social life. But it is not clear...