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The bank bail-outs enacted by the Brown government in the wake of the 2007 credit crunch have had a distinctive political character. Despite the government's pronouncements on the merits of swift and decisive interventions, I argue that this does not amount to a return to the interventionist regulatory form associated with post-war British welfare capitalism. The Polanyian distinction between ‘habitation’ and ‘improvement’ is used to show that the bail-outs were designed by contrast to...

At the turn of the twentieth century, a concatenation of diverse social movements arose unexpectedly in Latin America, culminating in massive anti-free market demonstrations. These events ushered in governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela that advocated socialization and planning, challenging the consensus over neoliberal hegemony and the weakness of movements to oppose it. Eduardo Silva offers the first comprehensive comparative account of these extraordinary events,...

This article focuses on the discursive construction in Britain of a middle-class moral panic occasioned by the distress caused to self-styled ‘responsible mortgage borrowers’ by falling house prices. In the context of the move towards asset-based welfare the sub-prime crisis manifested itself most obviously in the popular consciousness as a threat to housing market wealth. The Labour government used the political space opened up by the narrative of middle-class moral panic in order to...

Class relationships are amongst the fundamental drivers of development, and it is argued here that over the next 30 years a major influence on the pattern and path of development will be exerted by the rise of the ‘new middle classes’ of Asia. At the same time, in the context of the blocked transition of the present, it seems unlikely that those who are marginalised and excluded will be able adequately to organise resistance, much less change structures of power, but poverty will be managed...

This paper explores an explanation which elaborates how individuals effectively enact and sustain trust in the sphere of social economy and the capability. I discuss how value employed by actors and the strategies and power relation in the socio-economic value sphere and focus on the function of ‘trust’ as the key mechanism of the interaction. This paper examine South Korean consumer cooperative Hansalim as a case of social economy which successfully institutionalize their system in...

English, abstract: Attempts to understand the transformation processes in the developing world have often led to a closer examination of Europe′s and America′s own history, as many theories of development suggest a specific interpretation of these histories: Modernization theorists, for example, see Europe′s and America′s history mainly as a straightforward progression towards welfare and democracy, eclipsing the aspects that do not fit into this picture, like the World Wars or the American...

This paper investigates political-economic backlash to economic globalization in industrialized polities. It analyzes data on the content of party platforms to develop measures of party support for, or opposition to, political-economic closure, anti-democratic nationalism, and xenophobia in all party platforms of 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for all national elections between 1960 and 2003. These allow broader judgments of trends in autarky and autarchy...

AbstractA major thinker and inspiring teacher, Karl Polanyi's contributions have long been influential in a variety of disciplines, notably economic sociology and economic history. Two of his innovations, substantivist economic anthropology and the “double movement thesis,” are recognized as seminal. All of the works for which he is known, however, were written late in life, when in exile, and very little is known of his Hungarian writings, virtually none of which had, until now, been...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Towards a Green Republicanism: Constitutionalism, Political Economy, and the Green State John Barry (bio) The republic is threatened—who will stand by the republic? Introduction The range of threats to modern society ranging from growing environmental stresses (water shortages, deforestation, soil erosion to climate change), food and energy insecurity, peak oil, rising poverty and inequalities within and...

This article outlines a post-rationalist approach to international political economy that factors in the role of affect in social causation. There are key historical junctures where social transformations cannot be neatly explained by instrumental logics, such as the profit motive or the pursuit of increasing productive efficiency. Affect, in the form of anxiety and aggression, overdetermines social behaviour in ways that belie conventional notions of rationality, premised on a clear...

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great...

REVIEW: Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a...

The article focuses on social philosophers and brothers Michael and Karl Polanyi. Particular attention is given to Michael's political, economic, and social thoughts and how they compare to Karl's. The author wishes to illuminate Michael's social though through this comparative study. Topics include the brother's family background, Michael's early thought, and divergent paths.

KM: Both the title and the subtitle of this essay are adopted from Karl Polanyi, who published his famous book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time in 1944. More than six decades have passed since its publication, but, as Joseph E. Stiglitz states in the preface of the recent new reprint, “the issues and perspectives Polanyi raises have not lost their salience . . . it often seems as if Polanyi is speaking directly to present-day issues.” ... China is...

This article analyses the involvement of the Dalits (formerly 'untouchables') in the World Social Forum (WSF) processes. The focus will be on one networked organization in particular, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) as a key organization which served as a catalyst for linking the Dalit struggle against neoliberal globalization and casteism with the social forum process and the global justice movement. The article argues that the Dalit struggle, domestically and...

European integration is usually studied within the realms of comparative politics. The multitude of empirical studies concerning the topic have been well suited to its numerous methodologies and analytical frameworks. Comparative politics however, usually ignores the question of why European integration has both progressively deepened and widened during the last thirty years. Therefore there is a distinct absence of how developments in the global political economy determine European...

Inspired by Karl Polanyi’s writings on three allocation modes, namely reciprocity, exchange and redistribution, we first tested a reciprocity ring with ten players. The baseline treatment, with no possibility of socialisation, displayed very low levels of allocative efficiency. Consistently with the Polanyian approach to reciprocity, we found that inducing the notion of symmetry among the players increased efficiency levels significantly. We then simulated a market exchange, with significant...

Neoclassical economists posit that the freeing of market forces will lead, ceteris paribus, to a reduction in levels of corruption. There are several mechanisms through which this hypothesized effect is channeled, the most important of which is competition pressure brought by the entry of foreign firms into the domestic market. The empirical leverage of this approach has been strongly challenged by events of recent years. In China and Russia, market liberalization has not had the expected...

Two of the most salient aspects of the recent shift towards financialisation and neoliberal restructuring since the 1970s have been the restructuring of global production towards China, and the growing threat to workers’ livelihoods posed by increased capital mobility. Both of these trends can be seen as capital’s response to the crisis of profitability that has arisen from the unsustainable global social accord between workers and capital that was inherent in post-War US hegemony....