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From Keynes to Piketty provides the reader with an accessible and entertaining insight into the development of economic thought over the past century. Starting with John Maynard Keynes's bestseller, The Economic Consequences of Peace (1919), and ending with Thomas Piketty's blockbuster, Capital in the Twenty First Century (2014), the author explains which dramatic political and economic events changed the way economists interpreted these events, and how they revolutionized the economic...

There’s little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana.   Why? Most economists—from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty—say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated...

With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the...

As capitalism unfolds, continual technological advance -- in combination with the relentless accumulation imperative -- serves to amplify material progress. The expanding economic sphere begins to pervade the everyday lives and thinking of the individual. The institutionalization of the market fundamentally changes the structure of society and, in so doing, fundamentally changes the institutional structure through which individuals are socialized. The social dislocation generated therein...

Land ownership, as commonly understood today, originated with the enclosure movement during the English Tudor era almost four centuries ago. Karl Polanyi referred to this “propertization” of nature as the “great transformation.” That land, water, and air was a social commons is now archaic and forgotten, and with it the classical economic concept of rent, which was, in theory, once paid to royalty as the earth's guardian. Garrett Hardin's article, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” raised alarm...

As Karl Polanyi indicates in the 'Great Transformation',1'the so-called self-regulating markets cannot exist for any length of time without destroying human society'. Three 'Great Transformations' have taken place. The first occurred in Europe at a time when it was widely believed that markets were nature's way of managing exchange in an efficient way and that interference in the workings of the market, as Adam Smith argued, was not only artificial, but against the laws of God.2 The second...

Presents a development model for the recovery of the Irish polity post-2008 financial crisis and traces and compares the evolution of the development models of Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Ireland from 1987 to 2012, considering how those four countries managed the process of Europeanization. Explores the core Polanyian tension between markets and social protection, with particular reference to the capacity of selected small, open economies to manage that tension as compared with...

Many economists, including mainstream economists, have declared the necessity of an ambitious public investment program for Europe. The continuation of the present laissez-faire and austerity approach, they say, will deepen the dissatisfaction of European peoples with the European project. In effect, in the absence of inspiring progressive alternatives, there is the real prospect of nationalistic reactions everywhere, with fragmentation and the end of the EU (or even worse) as a consequence....

A fundamental methodological problem is the relevance of an antagonism of capitalism. This needs to be classified in light of the developmental stage of the means of production: far too little attention is paid to the contradictory character of individualization and socialization. This brings us to Karl Polanyi's main argument of disembedding. He also deals with a shift from the socially integrated (and dependent) individual to the utilitarian market citizen. The French regulationist theory...

A commentary on Asad Zaman's paper “The Methodology of Polanyi's Great Transformation”

This paper examines the long-run fluctuations in growth and distribution through the prism of wage- and profit-led growth. It argues that the relation between distribution of income and growth changes over time and proposes an endogenous mechanism that leads to fluctuations between wage- and profit-led periods. The ephemeral character of distribution-led regimes needs to be taken into account when someone estimates empirically the effect of a change in distribution on utilization and growth....

Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, provides an analysis of the emergence and significance of capitalist economic structures which differs radically from those currently universally taught in economic textbooks. This analysis is based on a methodological approach which is also radically different from existing methodologies for economics, and more generally social science. This methodology is used by Polanyi without explicit articulation. Our goal in this article is to articulate the...

The expression "sharing economy" has spread exponentially in the past few years, a sign of the growing interest in a phenomenon that continues to maintain boundaries that are somewhat vague. The hypothesis of this paper is that this can be attributed not only to the pervasiveness and enabling power of new technologies but also to the need to fill a social vacuum due to the failures of the market and the state. The sharing economy is introducing collaborative social forms able (at least...

In face of the strong conflict between market norms and social norms, peaceful co-existence is impossible. In traditional societies, markets were subordinated to society. Modern society emerged via a number of revolutions which made society subordinate to markets. This led to a reversal of traditional values of social cooperation and harmony with nature. Instead, men, nature, society became objects to be exploited for creating profits. A market society generates profits by exploiting men and...

The current global economic crisis concerns the way in which contemporary capitalism has turned to financialisation as a double cure for both a falling rate of profit and a deficiency of demand. Although this turning is by no means unprecedented, policies of financialisation have depressed demand (in part as a result of the long-term stagnation of average wages) while at the same time not proving adequate to restore profits and growth. This paper argues that the current crisis is less the...

The crisis of the European Monetary Union has revealed the weakness and the fragility of the European integration process. The paper examines the institutional changes which are at the root of the instability. What are the driving forces behind the introduction of the euro? What role do theoretical considerations play in this process? What influence on European integration has been exerted by neoliberal beliefs and convictions? Relying on an approach that combines basic insights of Gunnar...

This work introduces the concept of spontaneous order, its development through many schools of economic thought and its importance to today's society. This paper gives emphasis to Friedrich Hayek, since he has the most known model of spontaneous order, how he started to elaborate from his research about the role of the information on the economy and his maturation in Law, Legislation and Liberty. As a counterpoint to the Hayekian model, this work includes criticism to the concept and the...

The article critically examines the contributions of Polanyi and Granovetter on the embeddedness notions and functioning of any individual in social networks from the construction proposed by Lukacs in "The Ontology of Social Being". It is proposed to rethink and point clues to an explanation, consistent with the Marxian thought, the necessary links between the decision-making done in the here and now, in the quotidian of world of men, and the legalities and more general trends produced by...

My purpose here is to strengthen Karl Polanyi’s work through critique of and extension to abductive processes. Polanyi presented history woven into a new paradigm for analysis of socioeconomic systems, demonstrated discovery similar to abductive processes, and extended abduction into a holistic context. One of Polanyi’s most important contributions to socioeconomic analysis is the explanation of three integrated network models of socioeconomic reciprocity. They are coadjuvancy,...

The purpose of this article is to offer a Polanyian perspective on the issue of guaranteed income (GI). In analyzing the debate over the Speenhamland system, especially as Karl Polanyi ([1944] 2001) describes it inThe Great Transformation, he offered an important criticism of a GI program that some contemporary Polanyian economists have been struggling to come to terms with in their writings. Instead of defending a GI policy by seeking to reject Polanyi’s analysis of the problem, I suggest...