Your search

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...

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation is a powerful criticism of free market ideology and its intrinsic assumptions that is based on an implicit political theory of freedom. The attempt is made here of reconstructing and making explicit Polanyi's concept of "freedom in a complex society" in light of his commitment to a sui generis form of socialism and his lifelong opposition to arguments as found typically in Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. (English)

This paper elaborates an analytical template to problematize the politics of legal strategies and rights. In the literature, scholars have been arguing that courts have an individualizing effect on collective struggles, or that (human) rights constitute neoliberal subjects. Yet, it is possible to open this theoretical understanding to further complexities: the inclusion of movements into certain governmentalities may have positive effects for their struggle. The discussion follows two main...

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...

Karl Polanyi's main thesis is the effective separation of society and economy, placing the economy above the society. This artificial separation will be carried out by a series of theoretical tools and mechanisms -the introduction of fictitious goods and economic rationalism as a social premise- that will blind an overall view of the social panorama, focusing only on the economic aspects of it, causing that way, an unprecedented human crisis. (English)

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...

This article is devoted to the study of the food regime, a concept little known in Russian academic literature. The author identifies the "theoretical and methodological platform" of the concept using a comparative approach and retrospective analysis. The ensemble of a comparative-historical approach, a method of analyzing secondary data and a forecasting method contributed to the consolidation of the concept of the food regime as a tool capable of streamlining the global stages of...

Alternate Title: THE CONCEPT OF THE FOOD REGIME AND TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FOOD SITUATION IN THE MODERN WORLD. This article is devoted to the study of the food regime, a concept little known in Russian academic literature. The author identifies the "theoretical and methodological platform" of the concept using a comparative approach and retrospective analysis. The ensemble of a comparative-historical approach, a method of analyzing secondary data and a forecasting method...

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...

A leitura e síntese na longa duração recebe em Karl Polanyi a elegante solução que vem sendo apropriada na crítica ao mercado autorregulado da era neoliberal. Na forma de uma (quase) metáfo­ra, “A grande transformação” descreve a ascensão e a crise da sociedade liberal, com os fenômenos extremos que desencadeia com a sua sede de uni­versalização. As guerras, as revoluções e o fascismo marcam a tensão que transforma as relações inter­nacionais. Nesta obra, temos um trabalho de pes­quisa e...

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.

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...