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Researcher Karl Polanyi's "forms of integration"--redistribution, reciprocity, and exchange--have been much used to describe and explain various economies. Such mapping presents information about the sources and destinations of the flows of material means in each society in ways that are easily correlated with the variables that most thoroughly and simply account for the flows of material means in different societies. Mapping may be looked upon as the selection of a "projection" for...

This inquiry seeks to establish that the writings of author Karl Polanyi offered insights into key variables and historical conditions that gave rise to the system we know of as “fascism.” Integral to his insights, Polanyi describes economic conditions attendant for fascism to emerge, with one condition noted as widespread and persistent unemployment. Polanyi stresses that fascism needs to be understood as reactionary, a responding to features integral to classical liberalism. Considering a...

Digital capitalism’s information infrastructure is the subject of contentious debates concerning its transformative effects on the political economy and society. A frequent proposition, referring to older arguments of the ‘socialist calculation debate’, is that with big data analytics the pro-market arguments of neoliberal economists such as Hayek or Mises become obsolete. This article critically examines this proposition by drawing on Karl Polanyi’s notion of overview; a core theme in his...

Substantivism stemmed from the writings of Hungarian lawyer-turned-historian Karl Polanyi, who argued that capitalism is a historically unique kind of economy that is disembedded from the social matrix. By implication, the socially embedded pre-capitalist economies studied by anthropologists, historians and classicists cannot be understood using the formal economics developed to analyze capitalist economies. Rather, new tools for analysing their 'substantive' economies must be employed....

This article advances Rodrik's political trilemma of the world economy by using insights from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which helps to grasp the interwoven dynamics of long-term transformations due to climate change and geopolitical reordering on one hand, and on the other short-term political ruptures due to countermovements. Rodrik's globalization trilemma shows the incompatibility of hyperglobalization with the need for an enlarged democratic policy space. Its nodes...

This chapter examines Polanyi’s institutional theory of market-capitalist society. It shows that market society is, according to Polanyi, a peculiarly “economic” society: its economy appears both autonomous and dominant, constraining the structure and evolution of other social subsystems. The chapter also demonstrates that Polanyi’s theory and method allow an explanation of the institutional transformations of market society. In the face of today’s great economic difficulties, social...

Institutional economics is a sociocultural discipline and policy science which draws on the idea that economies are best understood through an appreciation of history, real-world institutions, and socioeconomic interrelations. This book brings together leading institutionalists to examine the tradition’s most essential perspectives and methods. The contributors to the book draw on a broad range of institutional thought from the classic work of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl...

Happiness economics unearths the undesirable effects of economic growth and criticizes the economic model based on the belief in the supremacy of market relations over the relational bonds of society. Economic growth brings about substantial increases in material well-being; yet, it has the potential to destroy the social and environmental fabric of society. This is visible in the post-World War II cross-country variability of the subjective well-being measures, which shows the importance of...

Neoliberalism has been able to change the markets and the economy of societies around the world. These transformations are especially important with regards to fictitious commodities: land, labor, and money. However, the 2020 pandemic imposes new limits, when life itself is at risk globally. This work highlights the major neoliberal reforms relating to fictitious commodities, the difficulties of society to resist and create counterweights. The health crisis that has emerged with the COVID-19...

We examine parallels and differences in the analyses of societal transition by Karl Polanyi and Joseph A. Schumpeter. We argue that although their understanding of historical processes differs - transformational-political vs. evolutionary-natural - the central mechanism of change they describe is the same. We identify three spheres essential to both authors' works: the economic, the political and the socio-cultural sphere. Polanyi and Schumpeter describe an expansion of the economic sphere...

The welfare system was meant to reduce the 9 vulnerability of citizens to the market, thereby containing the consequences of the market economy and labor commodification. [...] As an adaptation to the consequences of the market, the welfare system is an effort to cushion the effects of the market, not a change its underlying logic of commodification. [...] From this perspective, the political debates about the rules to be applied to the operations of the platform economy are part of the...

The chapter reconstructs the emergence and formulation of Karl Polanyi's central research question: How is responsible freedom possible in a complex modern society? The origins of this question in the time before the First World War and the confrontations with the challenge of neoliberalism and fascism are discussed. It is shown that Karl Polanyi's concept of freedom has four dimensions. Polanyi connects negative, positive, substantial and social freedom with each other and formulates a...

The chapter reviews aspects of the possible transformation of the financial system into a banking complex, that comprises both embedded Too Big to Fail (TBTF) financial institutions and disembedded ones. The transformation of the financial system into a two-tier banking complex is the result of the disconnection of the TBTF embedded institutions and the right size to fail disembedded financial institutions. The chapter revises the scope and consequences of this change on the monopolization...

This paper was inspired long ago by Jared Diamond (1997), and in particular by his extensive use of the concept of economic surplus as the key to the development of civilization. Unfortunately, Diamond does not mention the origin of the concept in classical and pre-classical economics, nor does he pay much attention to debates in economic anthropology about the role of economic analysis in studying primitive and ancient economic formations. These debates were the subject of a recent book by...

There is a growing consensus in social sciences that there is a need for interdisciplinary research on the complexity of human behavior. At an age of crisis for both the economy and economic theory, economics is called upon to fruitfully cooperate with contiguous social disciplines. The term ‘economics imperialism’ refers to the expansion of economics to territories that lie outside the traditional domain of the discipline. Its critics argue that in starting with the assumption of maximizing...

With the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of illiberalism in the aftermath of the global financial crisis we need a theoretical framework that links modernization, crises and the fate of democracy. In my paper I attempt to show that Polanyi’s thinking represents such a framework. I focus on Polanyi’s historically informed political economic analysis of the tensions between liberal finance and liberal democracy. In the first section I reconstruct Polanyi’s political...

This article is devoted to the evaluation of the institutional matrices theory (IMT), which was designed to illustrate the differences between Russian and Western political economic systems. IMT has no matrix, and it is an ideological declaration rather than a theory. It is a set of assertions and assumptions that are adopted without evidence, and then hypostatized to be Russian and Western socioeconomic systems. IMT literature claims to utilize the reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange...

How can we explain why Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation is more relevant today than ever before? The central thesis of the paper is that Polanyi's analysis is groundbreaking because it goes far beyond the interpretation of the civilization of the nineteenth century. By focusing on the "belief of economic determinism," Polanyi challenges the juxtaposition of being and thinking, of material life-process and consciousness. He rejects the assumption that society encompasses a world...