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This article looks at the issue of political disengagement in mature democracies and the growing tendency towards disconnect between citizens and their political representatives. It locates itself in relation to 'demand-side' (external to politics) and critical 'supply-side' (focused on the political centre) explanations of disengagement. It concentrates on the latter and, accordingly, builds on critical, post-Marxist and elite-oriented work. As such it follows on from earlier calls in the...

This paper analyses the rapidly emerging discourse of a green economy based on green growth. It highlights inherent conflicts and contradictions of this discourse such as the myth of decoupling growth from the environment, pollution generations and resource consumption. Using key theoretical constructs of both Gramsci and Polanyi, the paper argues that the green economy/growth discourse can be seen as a Gramscian ‘passive revolution’ whereby the dominant sustainable development discourse,...

To face an unequal world requires us to interpret and explain it, to be sure, but also to engage it, that is, to recognize that we are part of it and that we are partly responsible for it. In other words, inequality is not just something external to us, but also invades our own world. I begin, therefore, by examining the global community of sociology through the lens of inequality. I then consider two recent perspectives on our unequal world from outside sociology: the moral radicalism of...

Capitalist economic development has occurred unevenly, as certain economies began sustained growth relatively early, opening up an increasingly large gap with lagging countries. This well-known fact has encouraged much research on the prospects for undeveloped economies to "catch up" to the earlier developers. Japan and Russia in the late nineteenth century were two of the first countries outside of western Europe to experience substantial catch-up growth. Beginning in the 1860s, political...

Drawing upon The Great Transformation (1944), we outline Karl Polanyi's environmental sociology by presenting his major insights on economic substantivism, fictitious commodities, and double movements. Polanyi wrote his opus in challenge to Von Mises' Austrian School of Economics and its pursuit of an autonomous, self-regulating global free market. Polanyi's recognized the social and environmental limits of a fully free market and reasoned that inevitable market excesses would result in the...

This paper addresses what labor movement scholars are calling the "Polanyi-problem" - how societal movements can effectively re-embed neoliberal markets back into society - by drawing upon recent interpretations of Karl Marx writings on primitive accumulation and class formation. The author focuses on the case of Colombia's coffee farmers (cafeteros) - a class of producers whose historically-privileged modality of class reproduction was undermined by the liberalization of the coffee market...

This article discusses why many social scientists including Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, and Karl Marx are dissatisfied with an overreliance on markets, and a conceptualization of markets being efficient, fair and rational. Topics include five types of arguments critical of markets including the Marxian approach to markets, the rise of Karl Polanyi's view that markets are fragile, and a more complex decision-making approach starting with Max Weber's view of social action.

Despite the absence of a systematic analysis of economics in Sartre's work, we argue that a Sartrean economics can indeed be said to exist, even if it is an economics that still awaits development. The status that Sartre accords to the concept of scarcity allows him to advance the critique of economism begun by Karl Polanyi, who, for his part, had been satisfied simply to challenge the reduction of economics to its formal definition. Scarcity, Sartre teaches us, should not be submitted to...

The article explores the conception of the Great Transformation (GT) by economic historian Karl Polanyi and its contemporary applications. Topics covered include the continued existence of free market fundamentalism as a prominent ideology and as a living political project, the persistence of free market utopianism, and Polanyi's genealogy of the market system. Also discussed are his conception of industrialism and his use of functionalist theory to build a unified image of the social system.

Karl Polanyi identified a double movement which took place during the bourgeoisie hegemony when, instead of liberalism, it has made use of interventionism to perpetuate its domination over the working class. Several studies have tried to update his analysis by identifying the double movement nowadays. Nevertheless, the academia has not addressed the possibility of a reversed phenomenon where the working class would make use of liberalism to perpetuate itself in power. This paper aims at...

Ecosystem service valuation (ESV) attempts to transform the opposition of human economic necessity and ecological conservation by valuing the latter in terms of the services rendered by the former. However, despite a number of ESV-inspired sustainability initiatives since the 1990s, global ecological degradation continues to accelerate. This suggests that ESV has fallen far short of its goals of sustainable social transformation—a failure which has generated considerable criticism. This...

The article explores the established conception of actually existing neoliberalism. Topics covered include free-market neoliberalism, the nature of neoliberal theory, and the distinction between esoteric and exoteric neoliberalisms. Also discussed are the ideas of scholars Karl Polanyi and Ha-Joon Chang about the role of the state in capitalist development, and scholar Damien Cahill's idea that neoliberalism is defined by microeconomic policies of privatization, marketization and deregulation.

As China, India, and other industrializing giants grow, they are confronted with an inconvenient truth: They cannot rely on the conventions of capitalism as we know them today. Western industrialism has achieved miracles, promoting unprecedented levels of prosperity and raising hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet, if allowed to proceed unencumbered, this paradigm will do irreversible harm to the planet. By necessity, a new approach to environmentally conscious development is already...

Thomas Piketty's imposing volume has brought serious economics firmly into the mainstream of public debate on inequality, yet political science has been mostly absent from this debate. This article argues that political science has an essential contribution to make to this debate, and that Piketty's important and powerful book lacks a clear political theory. It develops this argument by first assessing and critiquing the changing nature of political science and its account of contemporary...

Polanyi's concept of the 'double movement' is frequently interpreted as the opposition between the problematic and unsustainable dynamics of the market and the benign and normatively desirable reaction against this by 'society'. This paper questions this dualistic interpretation of the double movement and undertakes a problematization of the Polanyian idea of social and environmental protection. It does this by revisiting the concept of the double movement in light of the recent...

KM - A book review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century that points out the glaring omission of Polanyi.

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...