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The article focuses on analysis of Karl Polanyi in the book "The Great Transformation" which explained the changes in Great Britain from eighteenth-century mercantilism to nineteenth-century free markets to the state-centered interventionism of the mid-twentieth century evident when he was writing. It mentions additional features needed for understanding the evolution of development thought and repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, leading to free trade in agricultural products.

Post-apartheid Durban civil society politics reflects not only durable anti-racist activism, but primarily, Karl Polanyi's pendulum of a 'double movement' of the market against people and environment on the one hand, and social backlashes against neoliberalism on the other. The most important movements and campaigns of a socioeconomic nature can be summarised as follows: local resistance to economic disempowerment and lack of service delivery in various trade union strikes (1994-present),...

Written originally on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, this article critically analyses how the ideas of Hayek and Polanyi have been deployed to understand neoliberalism. It argues that dominant scholarly interpretations tend to miss the significance of each thinker to an understanding of neoliberalism, as well as some of the key dynamics of neoliberal forms of capitalist regulation....

This article explores the concepts of spontaneity and spontaneous order, in particular their deployment by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Although in many respects these thinkers were poles apart, the article identifies a point of convergence. They both mobilize the concept of spontaneity in a manner that naturalizes a particular social process: for Hayek, the market economy, for Polanyi, society’s protective movement that arises in reaction against the market economy. To contextualize...

Democracy is in serious difficulties. Three features of the crisis stand out. First is the dominant culture of disillusionment in democracy, which transpires as the mistrust in constitutionalist institutions and values. Second, political authority, both at domestic and international levels, is largely substituted by the rule of non-transparent and unpredictable social powers. Third, democratic states are deprived of much of their capacity to govern, but they retain a non-negligible capacity...

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on...

After the financial crisis of 2007-08, many commentators, adopting a broadly Polanyian logic of reasoning, expected a departure from neoliberalism. The failure of this shift to materialize has typically been accounted for in ‘exceptionalist’ terms: the persistence of neoliberalism is understood not as a function of a specific legitimacy it has itself engendered, but in terms of external interventions by elites who manage to ‘capture’ executive and regulatory institutions and so to bypass...

The purpose of this article is to explore the commonalities and differences between Karl Polanyi and Antonio Gramsci in their assessment of the origins of fascism as located within the rise of capitalism in the nineteenth century and its structural impasse in the twentieth century. Specifically, the aim is to trace a set of associations between Polanyi and Gramsci on the transformations wrought across the states-system of Europe prior to the crises that engulfed capitalism leading to the...

This article interprets Hayek’s theoretical practice with the help of Polanyi’s framework. Hayek aimed at renewing liberalism after the interwar period, thus helping transforming it into neoliberalism, a real utopia instrumentally concerned with the political and moral economies underpinning markets. The distance between neoliberal theory and practice is less pronounced than it is sometimes assumed. The strength of neoliberalism partially stems from a capacity to articulate an effort to...

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.