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A decade before Foucault began to work with the related concepts of biopolitics and biopower, Gellner posed a series of questions which are suggestive of a similar line of inquiry. Gellner did not pursue this strand of his thought as an historical sociologist however. Instead he packaged it into a functionalist account of how industrial society reproduces itself. In Gellner’s writings, biopolitics is both present and absent, like a redacted text. This is the focus of this article, which...

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...

In this article, we analyze at a conceptual level some of the more relevant effects of the neoliberal takeover on the provision of social costs, including employment, health care, and nutrition. Adopting key perspectives of Karl Polanyi and other thinkers, we develop our examination under the seemingly perpetual conflict between markets and social reproduction. We argue that financialization has both expanded market spaces and changed relationships within those spaces. The ever-greater...

In this important book, Bryn Jones uses insights from political economy, historical analysis and sociological concepts of the corporation, as a socially disembedded but political actor, to address concerns over the over-reach of Anglo-Saxon corporation KM -- on page 6: "Following Karl Polanyi, I argue that ST/EM firms have outgrown and threaten to dominate, envelop and even undermine, some of the social and political institutions on which a sustainable market economy depends. Any...

This article examines the use of competition as an object and mode of governance. It first considers how competition might become a principle of economic organization and, relatedly, how it may become part of state projects and practices. Second, it comments on the discursive and material dimensions of competition, considering it as a social construct and as a social constraint. Third, it examines the rather idealized representations of competition in the broader doxa of liberalism and...

The bioeconomy is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and scholarly literature, but critical examination of the concept is lacking. We argue that the bioeconomy should be understood as a political project, not simply or primarily as a technoscientific or economic one. We use a conceptual framework derived from the work of Karl Polanyi to elucidate the politically performative nature of the bioeconomy through an analysis of an influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and...

The current crisis in Europe recalls the theory and practice of authoritarian liberalism, the idea that in order to protect economic liberalism and respect for fiscal discipline, representative democracy must be curtailed. This configuration was first identified by Hermann Heller in late Weimar as a response to the imperative to maintain the ideological separation of state and economy and presented by Karl Polanyi as conditioned by broader geo-political pressure to maintain the gold standard...

Making sustainability a policy goal is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Calls for a paradigm shift are becoming increasingly frequent and urgent. In fact, change toward a sustainable form of society seems to be more within reach than ever before. The mindset of people has changed in the course of economic and environmental crises. This publication presents the current scientific and practical approaches that shape and empower the process of change toward true...

Behind only that of Bronislaw Malinowski, the influence of the Central European polymaths Ernest Gellner and Karl Polanyi on socio-cultural anthropology in the 20th century was profound. Gellner and Polanyi also influenced much wider swathes of scholarship. They belong to different generations and were raised in quite different settings in Prague and Budapest respectively. What these thinkers have in common is a philosophy of history which posits the industrial revolution in northwest Europe...

The article provides the author's view on issues concerning free market economics. He mentions Mr. Spock, a fictional character in the "Star Trek," whom critics of free market economics often cite as the epitome of rational economic man or Homo Economicus, as well as features Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian-American economist, who opposed the idea of humans as rational economic agents in his work "The Great Transformation." He also mentions human reason and cultural pessimism.

China's foreign policy has been long committed to a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. While one could easily point out past and present-day inconsistencies in its implementation, this article argues that defenders and critics of the principle both rely on a limited interpretation of ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’ based on an ideology of Westphalian sovereignty. Particularly problematic is the conceptual distinction between the ‘political’ or...

The grip of austerity in European politics since 2008 presents a double puzzle: electorally weak center-left parties offering no definite alternative, and the surprisingly efficient pursuit of “fiscal consolidation”. To understand this double puzzle this article investigates the institutional bases of alternative economic thinking during the 1930s versus the post-2008 crisis years. Noting the recent prominence of a new social type, the European economist-technocrat (eet), I highlight the...

This article seeks to use Karl Polanyi's book, The Great Transformation, first published in 1944, to understand the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Polanyi's basic premise was that a great crisis must result from powerful causes. He argued that the crisis of the 1930s was a consequence of three distinct processes: deep imbalances in the global trading system, a crisis within the global financial mechanism that was supposed to manage those imbalances, and a failure of adaptation...

Polanyi offers a powerful vision of a “great transformation” that will reverse the subordination of society to the economy and reassert the primacy of social protection in the context of modern society. Pursuit of the great transformation is one way of conceptualizing the quest for “development” in the positive sense of ecologically sustainable human flourishing. This paper explores how the contemporary interaction of national and global political dynamics affects the trajectory of Polanyi's...

The state incentivizes investors to entrust capital to public corporations by granting shareholders enforceable rights over managers. However, these rights create legal “access points” through which social movements can make nonpecuniary claims on the corporation. I use original historical research on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s administration of federal securities law to show that concern over nonpecuniary claims motivates the state to enact the role of “market protector.” In...

Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation is a classic... it has come to be recognized as a founding charter for economic sociology. It anticipated major accomplishments of late-twentieth-century social science (including, among others, Ben Bernanke’s studies of the Great Depression and Amartya Sen’s work on famine). Its core problems—how do societies respond to globalization? how do they address the risks of market failure?—are central to contemporary macrosociology. It is probably time...

Twentieth-century consumer society was characterized by a process of disembedding as described by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (2001 [1944]). The Austro-American consumer researcher Ernest Dichter played a key role in preparing the ideological framework necessary for this process to succeed. In order to assess Dichter’s role and that of psychoanalytic motivation research in general in the creation of the idea of the disembedded consumer, this article presents an analysis of...

In the context of the literature on 'actually existing neoliberalisms', this article analyzes the policies and services supporting Italian foreign direct investment (FDI) in Slovakia. It identifies a group of organizations, both Slovak and Italian, which shape and deliver neoliberal pro-FDI policies. By studying such an 'investment promotion community' (IPC) before and after the global financial crisis of 2009, and during Italy's prolonged crisis, this article shows both the persistence and...

Evolution of the Property Relation defines an approach to economics which is centered around the concept of property and explores the historical evolution of the relationship of the individual, private property, and the state, and the distinctive changes wrought by the emergence of the market.