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In light of discussions around the common anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, this article puts these texts - iconic representations of social democratic and neoliberal political theory - into conversation with Michel Foucault’s subsequent, influential critique of neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. There are interesting points of contact in the way each text constructs its argument, even as they arrive at...

The Kurdistan Regional Government emerges out of the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq as a rare positive, providing both political stability and economic growth. However, the outward display masks a more complex domestic settlement where the trappings of the free market coexist with political parties who are significant economic actors. How can this model of development in Iraqi Kurdistan be explained? Turning to the writings of political economist Karl Polanyi, does his thinking on relations...

Abstract In this paper, we scrutinise the sharing economy from a moral householding perspective and evaluate the moral justifications for a sustainable form of the sharing economy. We consider the emergence of normative moral justifications through householding practices that rest on local mobilisation of people in defence of communities and commitments against the adverse impacts of neoliberal market capitalism. Our perspective draws on Karl Polanyi's conceptualisation of householding, that...

Microinsurance — defined as low‐cost insurance products targeting low‐income populations — exemplifies key themes in contemporary neoliberalism, and has figured prominently in neoliberalism's turn to discourses such as 'risk management' and 'financial inclusion'. The development of commercial markets for microinsurance, however, has in practice been highly variable and often very limited. This article considers the implications of this process of 'truncated commercialization'. It draws on a...

China's greater Middle East geoeconomic strategy is centered on an external trade and industry policy. This trade and industry policy combines geopolicy and geoeconomic policy to export industrial capacity bases in what amounts to a geoindustrial policy and a parallel trade strategy. Practical coordination is under the umbrella of the central International Capacity Cooperation macro-policy. China's provincial governments are then tasked with offshoring China's industrial capacity to Middle...

Over the last two decades a rich and diverse body of literature has emerged which uses the ‘double movement’ to analyse social, political and economic change in the global South. The main aims of this article are to expand the boundaries of this scholarship and improve our understanding of how to use the concept to analyse capitalist development in the region. It seeks to achieve this by explaining and extending the original formulation of the double movement, creating a dialogue between...

In the current times of political crisis, a giant thinker such as Karl Polanyi will return to the forefront of intellectual debate. Many of his important early articles have only been available in Hungarian or in German. With the publication of The Hungarian Writings (2016), edited by Gareth Dale (Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Brunel University London), a major gap in Polanyi studies has been filled. These essays, published for the first time in English, provide...

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought a series of economic reforms: privatization, increased foreign direct investment and weakened benefits. Correspondingly, some scholars expected trade unions to serve as a major contribution to the development of a democratic civil society that would serve as a Polanyian double movement to these disruptive reforms. However, Russia's steelworkers have stood out as particularly weak and unwilling to strike due to their dependence on their employer for...

This paper looks at the European integration project in its current iteration drawing on Karl Polanyi's assertion that markets are inseparable from the socio-cultural context. In this regard, all attempts to liberalise the economy (not excluding European integration, which is based on the principle of the single market) have practical and indeed tangible political ramifications. The main hypothesis of the paper lies in the recognition of the fact that the neoliberal agenda is one of the...

Amidst state-level budgetary pressures and growing elderly populations, many US states have adopted managed care for home-based services funded through the Medicaid program. New York State’s managed care mandate is part of a Medicaid ‘Redesign’ targeting health outcomes, cost control, and administrative efficiency, reflecting features emphasized by both governance and New Public Management frameworks, but neither adequately captures this case. Incorporating a Polanyian perspective can...

Polanyi's analysis and contributions have been brought back into discussion due to the rapid emergence of market-based instruments designed to tackle environmental degradation. Polanyi is a crucial reference in current debates on globalization and international political economy. This article seeks to explore and discuss how his perspective, and the founding concepts of his work, can help us to interpret the current process of the neoliberalization and commodification of nature.

The rise of populism across Europe and the US – first in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and then in the shape of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit vote in 2016 – are indicative of a seismic shift in the terrain of economic ideas in public discourse. Settled liberal norms concerning ever-increasing international market expansion, and the political integration required to sustain it, have been decisively upset by political forces that, whilst once on the...

Despite its centrality to current debates about globalization and neoliberalism, aspects of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation remain poorly understood. This article places Polanyi in conversation with Weber, Nietzsche, and Foucault in order to explicate his genealogy of utopian liberalism. This mode of thought emerged in the late 18[sup th] century as a response to the mass pauperism of the Industrial Revolution in England. It substituted a mechanistic naturalism for the political and...

The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism. By Tim Rogan (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2017), pp.263 + viii. AU$48.82 (hb). Available in Australia through Footprint Books.

There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal “Great Transformation” of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of...

Costly Fix examines the post-1995 Alberta tar sands boom, detailing how the state inflated the profitability of the tar sands and turned a blind eye to environmental issues. It considers the position of First Nations, the character and strength of environmental critiques, and the difficulties that environmental groups and First Nations have had in establishing a countermovement to market fundamentalism. The final chapter discusses how Alberta's new NDP government, in its first couple of...

In their new indictments of global neoliberalism and the economic profession's culpability in its harms, Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz press the case for reconstructed globalization that generates benefits for all and not just for corporate and financial elites. Both books are deeply consistent with the insights of Karl Polanyi, who had identified the inherent contradictions of the project to create what he called a self-regulating economy. Like Polanyi, Rodrik and Stiglitz are attentive...

In this important new book, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi take a fresh look at the big questions surrounding the peculiar social form known as “capitalism,” upending many of our commonly held assumptions about what capitalism is and how to subject it to critique. They show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically...

The economic crisis in Greece resulted in high unemployment and the dismantlement of social protection policies. How does society respond to the collapse of both welfare-state and market mechanisms? I examine these issues through the study of one working class community in Athens over 2012-13. Since the onset of the crisis, my informants experienced a simultaneous drop in living standards, loss of social status, and debasement of their symbolic construction of reality. To respond to these...

The article discusses whether the visionary thinking of economic historian Karl Polanyi provide a feasible fix in the 21st Century for forces of populism and neoliberalism. Topics include Polanyi's work is stated to offer three potential contributions to the formation of this generation's new Left which include analysis of fascism, post-Vienna approach to socialism.