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In the aftermath of the 1930s Great Depression, and as the Second World War was drawing to a close, Karl Polanyi concluded a critical analysis of market capitalism on an optimistic — and with the benefit of hindsight we can add premature — note, remarking that the ‘primacy of society’ over the economic system had been ‘secured’. Eighty years later, amidst the unresolved turmoil of another comparable global capitalist economic crisis and accumulating signs of a growing environmental crisis,...

Microanalysis holds sway over macroanalysis in contemporary criminology. All of criminology would be better off if greater attention were devoted to the big picture—the relationship between crime and the interplay of institutions in the social systems of whole societies. Microlevel researchers often assume that the reduction of individual criminal propensities leads ipso facto to reductions in aggregate crime rates, but the implied connection is illusive, has not been demonstrated, and is...

This essay sheds light on the neoliberal aspects of the Italian political-economic system exemplified in the relationship between capital, state and media. The main argument is that the specific marriage between neoliberalism and neocorporatism that characterizes Italy reveals a distinctive characteristic of neoliberalism: a class project relying heavily on the state. As Polanyi has suggested through the concept of 'embeddedness', capitalism has consistently developed through the double...

Karl Polanyi is the author of a modern social science classic, The Great Transformation, as well as a number of well-known and widely debated essays collected in Trade and Market in the Early Empires and Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies. These texts were researched and written either during his second exile in 1930s Britain or in wartime or post-war North America. Not so well known, however, are his Hungarian writings from the 1910s. Until recently, very few of these had been...

Darwin said all living things tend to multiply. However, nowadays, maintaining fertility rate below the replacement level of 2.1, human beings appear to have opted to let their population shrink. Perplexingly, it occurs while the environment seems to become more suitable for their survival. In solving this puzzle, we get a great help from Polanyi. We proved that people choose to have fewer babies and consequently, usher in depopulation, because by giving them the chance to assess all the...

Most analyses of the US financial crisis of 2007–2009 focus on the proximate causes. This article sees the crisis as a consequence of the decline of a long-term pattern of accumulation in the USA and seeks to outline the requirements for a new period of dynamic economic growth. Drawing on work done by the French Regulation theorists and the US analysts of Social Structures of Accumulation, the paper attempts to describe the types of institutional changes that would be needed to spark a new...

The coexistence of border-enforcement policies such as Operation Gatekeeper and economic liberalization programs such as NAFTA is arguably paradoxical given the simultaneous push towards afree flow of products but curtailed flow of labor. This paper presents a critical review and reassement of existing accounts of neoliberal statehood to make sense of this apparent puzzle. While some have argued that the state is eroding under neoliberal globalization, a more sophisticated analysis has...

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's 'double-movement' thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food...

The article offers information on the features that contribute to the modernization in Russia. It discusses various value structure theories from various persons. It says that from the analysis of world survey statistics, Yevgeny Yasin concluded that Russians are more conservative compared to other western countries. Details regarding the mentality of Russian people are discussed including Russians' high score on cycloid scale and their tendency to fulfill their task at the last moment....

This paper turns Karl Polanyi's concept of the "double movement" back on Polanyi and his intellectual contemporary, Friedrich Hayek, as a means to insight into the structural conditions of counter-movement in the second half of the 20th Century. After elaborating on the double movement concept, I contrast the trajectory of Polanyi and his greatest work, The Great Transformation, with that of Friedrich Hayek and his contemporaneous Road to Serfdom--treating each as protagonists in the...

Özet: 20. yüzyılın önde gelen iktisatçılarından olan Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), Büyük Dönüşüm adlı eserinde ortaya koyduğu özgün tezler ile halen kapitalizme en ciddi eleştiriyi getirmiş kişilerden biri kabul edilmektedir. Polanyi'nin klasik ENG: Karl Polanyi is known as one of the most famous economists of the world who strongly criticized liberalism and the idea of self-regulating market. Polanyi’s masterpiece The Great Transformation is still accepted as one of the most powerful...

In this paper I propose that role of law in Karl Polanyi's concept of the 'always embedded economy' (Block 2003) can be enriched by the application of the lens of community (Perry-Kessaris 2008) developed by Roger Cotterrell (1996-present). I begin with Polanyi's suggestion that economic action and interaction are always 'embedded' in wider social life. Reading through the lens of community, we can be more specific: any actor is at once engaged, to different degrees (from fleeting to...

Sociologists have examined the ways in which capitalism contributes to environmental degradation as well as how, in selected circumstances, it increases efficiency while reducing pollution and human injustices. In this review, we draw on Polanyi's concept of the double movement to illustrate how self regulating markets give rise to environmental degradation and inequities and, in response, how these conditions often stimulate the emergence of collective action in pursuit of regulatory and...

The Global South has entered an era of ideological flux. The inadequacies of neoliberalism have spawned a widespread questioning of this dominant worldview. Intellectuals and political movements search for an alternative development ideology that explains what has gone wrong, provides a vision of a more desirable future and suggests a process for achieving this goal. Responding to these challenges, the World Bank and other purveyors of the dominant model have undertaken a gradual shift from...

Depression-era bank suspensions and failures are conceptualized as products of the first part of what Polanyi (1994) called “The Great Transformation,” which involved an imbalanced institutional arrangement in which the economy dominated other institutions. Relying on Durkheim (1897/1951) and Merton (1938, 1968), it is argued that these banking problems accentuated the type of chronic anomie that Durkheim theorized would create normative deregulation and elevated suicide rates over the...

There now exists a significant body of theoretically informed empirical research into ‘neoliberal environments’. It comprises numerous studies which together explore the connections between neoliberal principles and policies, on the one side, and the biophysical world on the other. However, making sense of them is by no means straightforward, despite their common focus on neoliberal environments. It is currently left to readers of these studies to synthesise them into a wider, joined-up...

The purpose of this paper is to bring class compromise back into the study of South Korean political economy and present it as a possible alternative to the overwhelmingly one-sided neoliberal trajectory in South Korea. The process and conditions under which positive class compromise is acquired are identified in terms of the Polanyi-Gramsci nexus. This perspective suggests that the restoration of state-led developmentalism would be unfeasible under a democratic regime, while the...

This paper reformulates and extends Polanyi's main insights in The Great Transformations (2001 [1944]) and attempts to theorize the societal countermovement against neoliberalism by illustrating the cases of Korea and Japan. Polanyi's main approach was to synthesize three critical domains: the state, market, and society, and his notion of double movement should be understood as such. Predicated on his double movement, I analytically decompose the mechanism of societal countermovement,...

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi problematised the commodity status of labour. He described it as ‘fictitious' and asserted the human aspect of labour necessitates ‘protection’. In bringing Polanyi's mature works to bear on these claims, this article uses the ‘fictitious commodity’ concept to highlight the tension in neoclassical theory between concrete reality and its idealist construction of the economy. This contradiction directly challenges the veracity of the self-regulating...