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The chapter addresses the potential of Karl Polanyi’s contribution as a spatial theorist, or as an economic geographer in all but name. Although Polanyi did not identify as a spatial or geographical theorist as such, his work is rich with spatial insights and implications, notably as one of the original analysts of economic diversity. The chapter begins by contextualising Polanyi’s work in relation to the shifting locales and vantage points that shaped its production. It then turns to the...

In these remarkably stirring reflections, delivered at the 2014 conference from which most of the contributions to this volume emerge, the late Abe Rotstein, Polanyi’s student and collaborator, recalls the projected sequel to The Great Transformation, to be titled Freedom and Technology. Whereas the former was built on a social sciences approach using institutional analysis, the sequel was to follow the intention Hegel expressed in the words ‘Wir die religiöse Vorstellung in Gedanken fassen’...

This chapter brings Karl Polanyi into dialogue with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The dialogue is intended to make visible key aspects of Polanyi’s theoretical framework while also suggesting limitations in Piketty’s approach to political economy. Specifically, the authors use the concept of ‘predistribution’ – implicit in Polanyi – to critique Piketty’s emphasis on redistribution as the solution to growing wealth and income inequality. Predistribution...

In the last decades, Karl Polanyi has gained recognition as one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century. His seminal book, The Great Transformation, is listed among twentieth- century classics. How can this book, written more than seventy-five years ago, be applied to the current conditions? In order to answer this question the chapter not only compares the civilization of the nineteenth century in Europe with our own epoch. It also reconstructs some of Polanyi’s...

As factors of production, labor, money, and land play a role in economics that is rarely understood. The difficulty of deriving the contribution of the individual factor of production to the value of jointly produced final commodities (the famous “problem of imputation”) occupied generations of Austrian economists (Hayek 1984) and inspired Ludwig Mises to produce his 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (Mises 1935). Any attempt at rational socialist planning is...

The importance of the work of Karl Polanyi to social enterprise scholarship is often maintained. However, explanations as to how and why his ideas are so relevant to the field are still relatively scarce. In this essay, we argue that engaging with Polanyi’s work directly, and Polanyian scholarship more widely, can provide a deep understanding of the underlying assumptions within current social enterprise conceptualizations, and provide insights into how the relative positioning of market and...

In North America, uranium workers are fighting for their right to participate in a free-market system that provides them with small personal benefits. These workers experience powerlessness, instability, and unpredictability – or social dislocation – by living amidst capitalism’s polluted ecosystems, unstable economies, and disintegrating communities. However, they feel reliant on uranium for their livelihoods and strongly support the industry’s renewal and form sites of acceptance to...

This paper was inspired long ago by Jared Diamond (1997), and in particular by his extensive use of the concept of economic surplus as the key to the development of civilization. Unfortunately, Diamond does not mention the origin of the concept in classical and pre-classical economics, nor does he pay much attention to debates in economic anthropology about the role of economic analysis in studying primitive and ancient economic formations. These debates were the subject of a recent book by...

ABSTRACT A reading of Karl Polanyi’s work gives us a broader and more plural view of the development process beyond the exclusively economic dimension. This scientific text aims to recover the theoretical contribution of Karl Polanyi and its contribution to the understanding of the development process from a plural and substantive conception of economy. The key lesson learned in this research is that regardless of a country’s economic system, one should pay attention to the existing...

In a recent article for this journal, Stuart, D., Gunderson, R., and Petersen, B. [(2017). Climate change and the Polanyian counter-movement: carbon markets or degrowth? New political economy, 1–14. doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364] discuss solutions to climate change in terms of Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double movement. They set up their argument as a critique of my own article on the topic to make the point that carbon markets do not constitute a genuine form of such countermovement....

Drawing on a detailed analysis of Grabher and König’s study of platformization (Grabher & König, 2020), this essay develops a revision of Actor-Network Theory by proposing how a Device, Representation, Actor and Network or a DRAN Approach can be more helpful in making sense of platform economic processes. First, it locates the ways in which Grabher & König’s article approach platforms from an updated Polanyian perspective. Second, it elaborates on how the aforementioned article...

As far right movements, social disintegration and international conflict emerge from the decay of the neoliberal order, Karl Polanyi's warnings against the unbridled domination of markets, is ever more relevant. The essays in Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. They will interest Polanyi scholars and all interested in socialism and our future after neoliberalism. One asks whether, following Keynes and Hayek, Polanyi's...

This chapter argues that Karl Polanyi’s economic sociology offers foundational concepts for a radical analysis of the social and ecological conditions that have caused the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, it shows that Polanyi’s work, often claimed for social democracy, has the potential to provide much more radical insights into the question as to how to “re-embed” our economies, thereby leading to a fundamental rethinking about the ways in which the present crisis can be overcome.

An analysis of the connection between fascism and biopolitics in modernizing East Asia reveals that fascism served as colonial biopolitics, and was not historically specificity to Europe, though the rise of fascism was central to European colonialism and its technology of governance. As the last stage of capitalism, imperialism came with an expansion of social engineering in colonial countries, forcing colonized peoples to be “civilized.” I challenge the understanding of European fascism,...

Synthesizing material derived from Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, in Part I the concept of “national character” is delineated as a special case of “habitus” relating to the socio-spatial scale of the nation state. In relation to problems of state-formation, national character is shown to be a figurational and co-developmental function of the system of nation-states in which patterns of mutual identification and “imagined...

The goal of this chapter is to prepare the ground for theorizing the diversity and spatiality of markets, (necessarily) dealing with, but seeking to move concertedly beyond, the restrictive optic of the orthodox model. It seeks to do so by way of three steps. The following section opens up some preliminary questions about the place of markets and their actually existing historical geography. Next, the chapter turns to the challenge of decentring the market, of moving beyond the idea that the...

The origin of the present volume was an invitational workshop focused on questions of the spatiality and diversity of markets, held at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy in Montreal in the summer of 2017. This was an apt meeting place in a more than literal sense. Although many of those in attendance did not subscribe explicitly to a Polanyian worldview or mode of analysis, most had engaged with Polanyi’s work in different ways. Some had made extensive contributions to...

In the introduction of the 2001 edition of The Great Transformation, Fred Block argues that we all have much to learn from the insights of Karl Polanyi. Relying on Polanyi’s arguments in the Great Transformation is not only useful in order to understand the history of market liberalism, but also for the contemporary debate on globalization and its contestation. The work of Karl Polanyi is inspiring a lot of academics nowadays who are studying the global uprisings since 2008. Some academics –...

In an age of egregious inequality and rising authoritarian, many call for a new “moral economy” and turn to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation for inspiration. Yet Polanyi’s great insight is that those who cannot reckon with the moral economy of “market justice”—the claim that market outcomes, however unequal, are morally just—fail to understand the power of capitalism. Justified by its original claim to rest on natural science, market justice laid the predicate for democracy as mortal...