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Dominant strands of thinking in contemporary social science consider economic globalisation, the increasing role of cross-border flows and transactions in economic organisation, in terms of some combination of either limited or considerable economic impact and either positive or negative consequences for the general welfare. Little attention has been given thus far to its political consequences within those parts of the world, the developed countries of the Global North, where its impact...

Current social and political theory is sceptical of the future of welfare states in the face of global markets. Their moral claims, too, have been challenged by the neo-liberal association of market capitalism and individual freedom and by an implicit acceptance of that critique - of the welfare state as bureaucratic - by left-wing commentators. This article offers a defence of the national welfare state as the guarantor of 'complex freedom'. This defence is derived from the theoretical...

The article reviews the book "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time," by Karl Polanyi.

Assessments of resistance to globalization are necessarily influenced by the manner in which one conceptualizes these processes. Too often, both of the terms (‘resistance’ and ‘globalization’) are used promiscuously, the latter as a buzzword or catchall and the former in many different ways, sometimes as a synonym for challenges, protests, intransigence, or even evasions. Hence, we seek to juxtapose alternative explanations of resistance and highlight the complexities of conceptualizing it....

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation has had enormous influence since its publication in 1944. In form, this influence has been salutary: Polanyi targets one of the main weaknesses of modern economics. But in substance, Polanyi's influence has been baneful. Mirroring the methodological blindness he criticizes, Polanyi insists on the all-or-nothing existence/nonexistence of laissez faire--and on its all-or-nothing goodness/badness.

KM: Our point of departure is Karl Polanyi's classic work on the emergence of industrial capitalism and recent studies that further develop Polanyi's insights. We draw on these analyses to pose a fundamental issue confronting all capitalist societies: the need to restrain the market and prevent the economy from dominating other institutional realms. We explain how this general institutional challenge bear specifically on the problem of crime and crime control

Archaic Naukratis was a busy trading place in the Western Delta of the Nile, renowned for its sanctuaries and courtesans, granting the Greeks access to Egyptian grain and luxury items. Now, more than one hundred years after the discovery and excavation of Naukratis, the author offers the first full-length analysis of the archaeology and archaic history of this important site. Although Naukratis always features in modern accounts of ancient Greek colonization, it was not a place where the...

Those who believe that the free market is positively related to both economic efficiency and individual freedom are prone to regard resistance to the establishment of the global market essentially free from any serious sociopolitical constraint as a politically insignificant expression of impatience, ignorance, and hypocrisy. This article attempts to endow the manifestation of discontent with the status quo evident in public protests in Seattle and Washington DC with political significance...

Researcher Karl Polanyi's "forms of integration"--redistribution, reciprocity, and exchange--have been much used to describe and explain various economies. Such mapping presents information about the sources and destinations of the flows of material means in each society in ways that are easily correlated with the variables that most thoroughly and simply account for the flows of material means in different societies. Mapping may be looked upon as the selection of a "projection" for...

This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies,...

This inquiry seeks to establish that the writings of author Karl Polanyi offered insights into key variables and historical conditions that gave rise to the system we know of as “fascism.” Integral to his insights, Polanyi describes economic conditions attendant for fascism to emerge, with one condition noted as widespread and persistent unemployment. Polanyi stresses that fascism needs to be understood as reactionary, a responding to features integral to classical liberalism. Considering a...

This article reconstructs Karl Polanyi’s account of fascism’s rise in his 1935 article, “The Essence of Fascism.” Following the elevation of Hitler to power in 1933, Polanyi embarked on a reassessment of Nietzsche, Othmar Spann, Spengler, Evola, and other figures of the interwar conservative revolution. He argues that the fascist quest for national unity emerges when 19th century liberalism fails to address the growing atomization and economic dislocation of modern society. On the one hand,...

Digital capitalism’s information infrastructure is the subject of contentious debates concerning its transformative effects on the political economy and society. A frequent proposition, referring to older arguments of the ‘socialist calculation debate’, is that with big data analytics the pro-market arguments of neoliberal economists such as Hayek or Mises become obsolete. This article critically examines this proposition by drawing on Karl Polanyi’s notion of overview; a core theme in his...

This article applies Karl Polanyi’s concept of a double movement to the trajectory of rural state policies in China since 1949. It argues that Chinese socialism created a contradictory social contract that has fueled an ongoing struggle between state and peasantry over the surplus generated from rural land. This struggle has shaped a historical oscillation between state policies that facilitate extraction of agricultural surpluses and policies that introduce social protections in the form of...

The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of European economic and monetary integration, one...

Substantivism stemmed from the writings of Hungarian lawyer-turned-historian Karl Polanyi, who argued that capitalism is a historically unique kind of economy that is disembedded from the social matrix. By implication, the socially embedded pre-capitalist economies studied by anthropologists, historians and classicists cannot be understood using the formal economics developed to analyze capitalist economies. Rather, new tools for analysing their 'substantive' economies must be employed....

The causes and consequences of revolutionary change have long been the subject of scholarly debate. Through a systematic integration of political economic elements into an analysis of contemporary social transformations, this article joins this conversation by asking how Karl Polanyi’s double movement framework can clarify, and be extended by, the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. By embedding a nuanced account of neoliberalism in Egypt’s modern politics and by bringing those in dialogue with...

This book offers a critical reconstruction of the double movement, the central thesis of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, one of the most influential books of the 20th century. The double movement is the establishment of a free market economy and the subsequent effort by society to ameliorate the destructive effects of the market. In Polanyi’s bold vision, the double movement constituted the hidden gear of social change and historical transformation within capitalism. The book is a...