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The work of Karl Polanyi has gained in influence in recent years to become a point of reference to a wide range of leading authors in the fields of economics, politics, sociology, and social policy. The volume is a combination of reflections on, and assessment of, the nature of Polanyi's contribution and new strands of work, both theoretical and empirical, that has been inspired by Polanyi's insights. It gathers together the key contributions to the first ever workshop on the work of Karl...

Karl Polanyi is principally known as an economic historian and a theorist of international political economy. His theses are commonly encountered in debates concerning globalisation, regionalism, regulation and deregulation, and neoliberalism. But the standard depiction of his ideas is based upon a highly restricted corpus of his work: essentially, his published writings, in English, from the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing upon a broader range of Polanyi's work in Hungarian, German, and English,...

Bringing together contributions from an international group of social scientists, this collection examines diverse crises, both historical and contemporary, which implicate market forces, widening inequalities, social exclusion, forms of resistance, and ideological polarisation. The Commonalities of Global Crises offers carefully researched case studies which stretch across large geographical distances- from Egypt to the US and from northern, central, eastern and southern Europe to South...

The 1990-1991 First Gulf War became a classic manual of PR or manipulation, depends on the terms one chooses. Within the whole manipulative framework, Hill and Knowlton, one of USA’ s foremost advertising brands played a pivotal, ripple-making role. With the money provided by Kuwaiti government in exile, H&K faked several testimonies according to which Saddam’s soldiers had been responsible of appalling deeds by pillaging Kuwaiti hospitals, where they stole incubators and left newborn babies...

There’s little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana.   Why? Most economists—from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty—say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated...

The pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a new age—the Anthropocene. Humans have altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. The Great Acceleration explains the causes, consequences, and uncertainties of this massive uncontrolled experiment.

In this article we analyse Fair Trade as a form of non-state regulation, building on the literature on the internal politics and governance of Fair Trade International (FTI) certification. We focus on recent developments in the FTI certification system, including the split of Fair Trade USA from FTI and the emergence of the Small Producer's Symbol (SPP) as an alternative to FTI certification. We highlight the role of the three regional Producer Networks, in particular the Latin American...

As pundits discuss the causes and results of the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession, economists of various strands--led mainly by Keynesians--are slowly beginning to question the supposed wisdom of unfettered markets. Since Keynesian-liberal disputes revolve around the symptoms of the crisis rather than the historical and structural features of market economies, we thought that a Hayek-Polanyi comparison would be a timely intervention in order to understand the real nature of...

The Eurozone’s reaction to the crisis beginning in late 2008 involved not only efforts to mitigate the arbitrarily destructive effects of markets but also vigorous pursuit of policies aimed at austerity and deflation. To explain this paradoxical outcome, I build on Karl Polanyi’s account of a similar deadlock in the 1930s. Polanyi argued that a society-protecting response to malfunctioning markets was limited under the gold standard by the prospect of currency panic, which bankers used to...

This paper draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi in analyzing the consequences of legal regimes that regulate genetically modified foods. Against the tide of neoliberalism, a binding, precautionary agreement over trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has emerged through the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. This Protocol exemplifies what Polanyi termed the ‘self-protection of society,’ the second phase of his double movement. The Protocol's final form was a product of...

Responses to the imposition of market-oriented economic policies have varied. This article asks two questions: (1) How can we better understand when marketization will or will not prompt resistance? And (2) when people do mobilize, why are some movements broad-based while others draw on particular segments of society? The author argues that these questions can best be answered by focusing not only on the political contexts and resources available to potential social movements, but also on...

Karl Polanyi was one of the most influential political economists of the twentieth-century and is widely regarded as the most gifted of social democrat theorists. In Reconstructing Karl Polanyi, Gareth Dale draws upon primary sources archived in the countries that Polanyi called home—Hungary, Austria, Britain, the United States, and Canada—to provide a sweeping survey of his contribution to the social sciences.   Polanyi’s intellectual and political outlook can best be summarized through...

This chapter considers white European and American thinking on transatlantic slavery historically and, more briefly, in relation to today’s antislavery movement. Combining historical longue durée and a critical engagement with Nancy Fraser’s neo-Polanyian position, O’Connell Davidson shows that abolitionists were, and are, hard to fix as proponents of either market freedom or social protection, or indeed of ‘emancipation’. The postabolition experience of freed slaves shows that...

The last 50 years of nation building has firmly established Singapore as a globally competitive and highly successful economy and city-state with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Singapore has achieved a prosperity undreamed of by its founders. How successfully Singapore can evolve into a fully developed nation, with a firm sense of national belonging, social cohesion, political legitimacy and participation—and not just a strong and successful developmental state—will...

This article discusses the difference between a social policy approach to the regulatory embedding of a market and a moral economy approach using the insurance case wherein the European Union's Court of Justice ruled that insurers may not discriminate on grounds of sex in identifying risks.

This article analyses the trajectory of Benjamin J. Cohen's work by focusing on his ongoing concern with the nature and governance of world order. It does so by playing out his debt to realism and to Keynesianism. In a first moment, Cohen criticises the economic determinism of dependency scholarship, while turning to political realism, and then to possible Keynesian co-operation under anarchy: agents have the power to affect positive change. Later, Cohen the disillusioned Keynesian, watching...

In 1944, two seminal works of political and social theory appeared: F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation. Both works focused on society's spontaneous resistance to the 'marketization' of life. Yet, the authors arrived at opposite normative conclusions. This article attributes the normative distance to a methodological clash over the role and limits of normative theorizing in the concrete and sometimes uncooperative world of politics. This clash, in...

A decade before Foucault began to work with the related concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Gellner posed a series of questions which are suggestive of a similar line of inquiry. Gellner did not pursue this strand of his thought as an historical sociologist however. Instead he packaged it into a functionalist account of how industrial society reproduces itself. In Gellner’s writings, biopolitics is both present and absent, like a redacted text. This is the focus of this article, which...

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and...

Making sustainability a policy goal is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Calls for a paradigm shift are becoming increasingly frequent and urgent. In fact, change toward a sustainable form of society seems to be more within reach than ever before. The mindset of people has changed in the course of economic and environmental crises. This publication presents the current scientific and practical approaches that shape and empower the process of change toward true...