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In an attempt to analyse the socio-economic transformations of the European Union, an increasing number of scholars have resorted to Polanyi's double movement thesis. In doing so, some scholars, by looking at the evidence of intensified marketisation of social relations, consider the EU disembedded; whereas others identify a re-embedding tendency in the recent surge of socio-environmental protection. The paper follows Lacher, Burawoy, Dale and Streeck's readings of Polanyi and argues that...

The authors respond to arguments raised by political scientist Hartmut Elsenhans in his article "Capitalism and Global History: Some Thoughts on History and Theory," published within the issue. Topics discussed include the double movement theory of political economist Karl Polanyi, social factors that influence capitalism, and the way Elsenhans interpreted modern capitalism using Marxian materialism concepts.

Following decades of economic globalisation and market-oriented reforms across the world, Karl Polanyi'sdouble movementhas been invoked not only to explain what is happening but also to give reasons for being hopeful about a different future. Some have suggested a pendulum model of history: a swing from markets to society leading, in the next phase, to a swing from society to markets, and so on. The double movement can also be understood dialectically as a description of an irreversible...

Marx and Polanyi both held that socialism, in one form or another, was a preferable and possible alternative to capitalism. Their ideas are seen to offer theoretical tools to understand the tensions and contradictions of capitalism, and to inform ways to overcome them. This paper discusses Polanyi's work from a Marxist perspective in order to illuminate his strengths and weaknesses. Its main focus is to discuss Polanyi's juxtaposing of commodification against exploitation, in diagnosing the...

The crisis of neoliberal globalization has led many scholars back to Karl Polanyi in their search for alternatives to the present malaise. The dominant reading appropriates the concepts of embeddedness and the double movement in support of a system of regulated, welfare-state capitalism. This article contends, however, that the concepts of embeddedness and the double movement point not towards the need to regulate capitalist markets, but towards the radical supersession of capitalism itself.

EXCERPT [KM]: Karl Polanyi has experienced a renaissance in recent years.13 We refer to his work in our remarks on the failures of the European project for three interrelated reasons: (1) Polanyi has underlined that modern markets were not generated by some evolutionary process but established by political planning.14 Europe's “internal market project” is the best conceivable confirmation of his thesis. (2) One of the most important insights of his work concerns the “social embeddedness” of...

The decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union to ban sex discrimination in insurance has shown the potential reach of the principle of non-discrimination. This paper discusses the different positions taken by participants in the policy process leading up to the decision, in order to reveal the potential and limitations of non-discrimination as the basis for market-regulatory social policy. It is shown that the European Commission's initial support for prohibiting insurance...

Historically, the production of a market society has depended on the commodification of valuables such as land and labour, which has also meant the disembedding of capital from elements of the “primordial,” such as kinship, spiritual relations, and identities. Today we are still witnessing the invocation of such elements of moral economies as a basis for people's collective mobilization against market pressures. The case study in this article refers to Rosia Montana, a semi-urban village in...

¿Cómo es posible que un libro escrito hace setenta años despierte hoy un renovado interés y que sirva para hacer mejores diagnósticos sobre la crisis económica y sus posibles alternativas? En este texto trataremos de dar respuesta a este interrogante, mostrando los elementos que hacen de la obra de Polanyi un buen punto de partida para observar la crisis de legitimidad política y los problemas de relación entre economía de mercado y sistema político. La crítica de Polanyi a la naturalización...

Marketisation of urban service delivery gained renewed intensity in the crisis. Mobilising Polanyi’s concept of double movement, we analyse how marketisation of public services both creates and constrains the potential for urban counter movements in the USA and Europe. We identify three main urban responses: ‘hollowing out’, where cities engage in service cut backs; ‘riding the wave’, where cities attempt to harness the market; and ‘push backs’, where cities and citizen movements oppose...

In this article I discuss Polanyi's intellectual formation in early twentieth-century Budapest and in 1920s Vienna, focusing in particular upon his relationship to Guild Socialist and Marxist theory and to Austrian Social Democracy. It was a period in which Marxism was evolving rapidly, and Polanyi was too. In his twenties, he reacted forcefully against what he saw as the evolutionary and deterministic traits of Marxist philosophy. In his thirties, his relationship to Marxism underwent a...

In this paper, we critically assess two of the key conceptual foundations for the comparative capitalisms (CC) literatures, neo-pluralist political science and economic sociology, in order to identify more clearly the deep intellectual roots of these literatures. Principally, we focus on how the strengths of neo-pluralism and economic sociology – their attention to detail in considering the huge range of ‘types’ of capitalism that exist across the world – come at a high price. Put briefly,...

This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on the issue of market societies with an the analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism(VoC) approach. The article departs fromthe argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working ofmodern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralismwhich considers institutional change as just an interplaywithin a self-odering...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of civil war during the Thirties (1929-1939). To this purpose, the work analyses the development of the Civil War discourse in the thought of Carl Schmitt and Karl Polanyi, trying to focalize on the relationship between its consequences on the civil war and the conflicting ideologies which characterised that period. Hence, the Civil war is described, through these different narrations, showing two different sides of modernity: the destructive...

This article identifies a triple crisis of capitalism based on the three fictitious commodities as identified by Karl Polanyi: labour, money and land. This framework is used to integrate the environmental crisis into the wider crisis of capitalism. It argues that international actions required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are going to present major challenges for capitalism with implications for the current dominance of market power and the subservience of state and social power. The...

While struggles over land dispossession have recently proliferated across the developing world and become particularly significant in India, this paper argues that existing theories of political agency do not capture the specificity of the politics of dispossession. Based on two years of ethnographic research on anti-dispossession movements across rural India, the paper argues that the dispossession of land creates a specific kind of politics, distinct not just from labor politics, but also...

Drawing on a Polanyian analysis of the land question, this article aims to analyse both Western and Indigenous cosmologies of Abya Yala—the name that indigenous peoples give to the American continent—to understand the relationship between human beings and land and nature. These cosmologies are at the heart of the way in which two distinct societies construct their regional space, one from ‘above’, the other from ‘below’, and they are therefore key to understanding today’s climate change...

The concept of the ‘counter-movement’ has had a significant impact within studies in International Political Economy (IPE). In the light of the credit crisis and the growth of growing resentment to the notion of the free market, the idea of the counter-movement has been utilised to understand social reaction to neoliberalism. This article argues that whilst the counter-movement has been used in unique and innovated ways, Karl Polanyi himself used the term largely to refer to a specific...

This essay puts into context the debate between Michael Jacobs and Ian Mulheirn, exploring the theories and themes underpinning their arguments, published in issue 84 1 of the Political Quarterly. It discusses, firstly, the roots of Mulheirn's approach in European neoliberalism and, secondly, the roots of Jacobs' approach in a range of sources currently contending for authority over debates within the Labour party. These include themes drawn, broadly, from Polanyi, Keynes, Schumpeter and...