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This text aims at accounting for the plurality of money by emphasizing the delicate and evolving balance of the legal monetary systems and the continued existence of moneys that stay outside, though their continuation is subjected to chronic difficulties. It uses Polanyian concepts to take the wide and increasing variety of money into account and mobilizes criteria able to analyse the variety of links between them. It proposes a framework based on the representation of a "plurality triangle"...

Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek are often portrayed as implacable intellectual opponents but their respective historical trajectories suggest some telling similarities. Here we describe some key similarities in their approach to markets, as a prelude to evaluating the political consequences of relying upon their Austrian conceptions of nature-based and constructivist framing of markets. Perhaps it is time to transcend their dichotomy.

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...

Modern heterodox theories of money reject the neoclassical conception of money as primarily a medium to facilitate exchange. These heterodox theories of money all have as common starting point an analysis of credit-debt relations in which production is a central feature, with these economies organized along capitalistic design. The Keynesian-Marxian framework describing the process of monetary circulation, traditionally referred to as the theory of the monetary circuit (TMC), perhaps best...

El artículo presenta un discurso del autor en la Conferencia de la Sociedad de Postgrado de Economía de la Universidad de Colombia, Nueva York, en 1950, acerca del análisis institucional a las ciencias sociales. Comenta sobre la relación entre tales ramas de las ciencias sociales como la historia, la economía y la antropología. ENG: The article presents a speech by the author at the Conference of the Graduate Society of Economics of the University of Colombia, New York, in 1950, about the...

Post-Keynesian institutionalist economists like Wallace Peterson and John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that the impact of uncertainty on economic wellbeing depends in part on the degree of control people have over the sources and consequences of it. Given the inability of government and other large institutions to reduce uncertainty or to provide citizens with the ability to manage it, mediating structures are considered as an alternative means of promoting economic security. The article...

This paper presents a memorial to the great Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, with special emphasis on recent Japanese scholarship. To begin with, I affirm that for Polanyi “fictitious commodities” and “fictitious commodity markets" were key institutions of market society. Next I consider his assertion that the Poor Law controversy played a crucial role in introducing a competitive labor market into Britain from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century....

There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal “Great Transformation” of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of...

Ecological economics is largely about the ‘substantive’ (in ‘kind’) study of the economy, as opposed to a purely ‘formal’ economic analysis (in ‘money’). Following Kapp, Polanyi and others, this article argues that ‘substantive economics’ is interested in the biophysical and politico-institutional structure of the economy rather than in correct prices within a particular axiomatic conformity, as in ‘formal economics’. After outlining the history of the substantive vs. formal dichotomy, we...

In this article, we attempt to update the understanding of the external constraint in Latin America by examining the recent history of the region through the analytical framework of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. As we argue, the greatest force behind today’s external restriction is the financial sector, much as it was a century ago. To reinforce this hypothesis, we provide the reader with relatively new historical material and with arguments made by scholars from diverse...

It is well known that Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation were written contemporaneously (between 1940 and 1943), that their authors propounded antithetical political ideologies (right-wing liberalism and left social democracy respectively), and that the two books revolve around a similar problematique: the causes of the collapse of liberal order in the interwar era. This chapter undertakes a detailed comparison of Hayek and Polanyi’s...

In their new indictments of global neoliberalism and the economic profession's culpability in its harms, Dani Rodrik and Joseph Stiglitz press the case for reconstructed globalization that generates benefits for all and not just for corporate and financial elites. Both books are deeply consistent with the insights of Karl Polanyi, who had identified the inherent contradictions of the project to create what he called a self-regulating economy. Like Polanyi, Rodrik and Stiglitz are attentive...

In this contribution we offer a broad overview of the technological, institutional and policy dynamics associated with the great transformation--borrowing Karl Polanyi (1944) expression--leading from traditional, mostly rural, economies to economies driven by industrial activities (and nowadays also advanced services), able to systematically learn how to implement and eventually how to generate new ways of producing and new products under conditions of dynamic increasing returns. Such a...

Esta monografia versa sobre as visões críticas de Karl Marx e Karl Polanyi à ideia de livre mercado proposta por Adam Smith. Smith disserta sobre a positividade no funcionamento automático dos mercados e, assim, funda o bem-estar das sociedades nas ações livres e espontâneas no domínio econômico. Marx crítica essa sociedade livre por visualizar grandes contradições em seu funcionamento, em especial no que diz respeito à relação de trabalho, uma vez que o trabalho é elemento fundamental na...

En el presente trabajo mostraremos que la filosofía liberal operó en muchas ocasionesa través de un esquema teleológico, desde el cual entendía que la espontaneidad delmovimiento histórico conducía de forma natural hacia una economía de mercados libres.Semejante interpretación tenía que presuponer otra controvertida tesis, a saber, que lascategorías que informan la racionalidad práctica dentro de una sociedad de mercado no sonuna simple contingencia histórica, sino que responden a la...