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The purpose of this paper is to contrast the work of Douglass North and Karl Polanyi regarding financial institutions associated in market economies. Both implicitly acknowledge the synergy between public and private financial markets, which can serve to solidify an alliance between wealth holders and the state, potentially at the expense of “sociery” at large. This alliance may stimulate growth, according to North, as well as impose the strain of the market, according to Polanyi. Taken...

This article outlines a post-rationalist approach to international political economy that factors in the role of affect in social causation. There are key historical junctures where social transformations cannot be neatly explained by instrumental logics, such as the profit motive or the pursuit of increasing productive efficiency. Affect, in the form of anxiety and aggression, overdetermines social behaviour in ways that belie conventional notions of rationality, premised on a clear...

Introduction: In February of 1941 Karl Polanyi wrote to his daughter Kari about his intention to submit to the publisher the first three chapters of the book The Great Transformation. The Origins of the Cataclysm. About the book, he wrote “[I]t will be a very straight-forward, simple story, easy to read and mainly historical in character”. A week later he added a post-script. Referring to the Notes in the manuscript, he wrote, “[T]he book is seemingly so simple and unsophisticated that...

This editorial considers the opportunities opened up for anthropologists by the financial crisis of 2008. The chief of these is the exposure of cracks in the intellectual hegemony of free-market economics which contributed to an unnecessarily defensive posture on the part of most anthropologists during the period of neoliberal globalization. The authors claim that anthropology can bridge the gap between everyday life and the world at large by combining the study of ideas and social actions....

This paper sketches out some preliminary thoughts on political economy that stem from problematics that emerge from TWAIL. The TWAIL story of international law is one of frustration and disappointment because of the constant exploitation of the Third World despite all the historic changes in international legal ideas and institutions, but it also a story of hope in the moments of resistance. In order to better debate how particular international institutions should be changed or whether...

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great...

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This paper will cover a wide range of issues. It will start with a reconstruction of the European Community’s ‘social deficit’, arguing that a credible response to this deficit would be a pre-condition for the democratic legitimacy of the deepened integration project. Such a response can be developed in a re-conceptualisation of European law as a new type of supranational/trans-statal conflict of laws – this is the thesis defended in the second section. This vision is contrasted in the third...

The global market continues to create the "great and permanent evils" so well outlined by Karl Polanyi in his book, The Great Transformatioit His description of the destructive effects of the emerging self-regulating market during the Industrial Revolution is reflected today in the ongoing erosion of social, environmental, and economic sustainability in both the North and the South. In this downward spiral of life parameters, fair trade opens up the possibility of a market where we all fit,...

This paper examines unconditional basic income schemes proposed by Philippe Van Parijs and by Ross Zucker in light of Karl Polanyi's analysis of the 1795 Speenhamland Law and of Esping-Andersen's use of decommodification as a signifier of social provisioning in welfare states. It discusses tradeoffs between productive advantages of market-based economies and dehumanizing disadvantages of commodified labor. Contemporary redistributive schemes such as those of Van Parijs and of Zucker extol...

The article focuses on social philosophers and brothers Michael and Karl Polanyi. Particular attention is given to Michael's political, economic, and social thoughts and how they compare to Karl's. The author wishes to illuminate Michael's social though through this comparative study. Topics include the brother's family background, Michael's early thought, and divergent paths.

KM: Both the title and the subtitle of this essay are adopted from Karl Polanyi, who published his famous book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time in 1944. More than six decades have passed since its publication, but, as Joseph E. Stiglitz states in the preface of the recent new reprint, “the issues and perspectives Polanyi raises have not lost their salience . . . it often seems as if Polanyi is speaking directly to present-day issues.” ... China is...

Building on Polanyi's concept of the “double-movement” through which society defends itself against domination by the self-regulating market, this article sets out some key organizational and ideological hurdles that the contemporary “movement of movements” must surmount to challenge the hegemony of neo-liberal globalization. After outlining neo-liberalism's failures, it makes an argument for the possibility of “counter-hegemonic globalization,” defined as a globally organized project of...

Based on a sample (n = 6,407) from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort, this study found a sizable majority (69.1%) of support to replace a portion of Social Security with Private Retirement Accounts. Logistic regression analysis showed that SES was a robust predictor of PRA support, particularly for upper class vs. lower class respondents. Findings suggested that there may be less support for a major pillar of welfare state social provisioning, despite successful...

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine offers a weak analysis of ‘neoliberalism’ linked to a defeatist ideology. If we wish to move beyond the global economic crisis, we should borrow ideas from Mauss, Polanyi and Keynes; but the political level for an appropriate response is not obvious.

The purpose of this essay is to provide the historian with a generic understanding of the term economy by examining some aspects of the work of the Hungarian “economic historian” Karl Polanyi (1886–1964). It does not seek to explain Polanyi's economic ideas to economists nor does it seek to locate his ideas within the discourses of the academic discipline of economics; there is abundant academic literature which carries out those tasks. This essay is intended to help fill a void in the...

In January of 2001, the TimberWest Corporation permanently closed its Youbou sawmill facility near Duncan, British Columbia, Canada laying off 220 workers. On the surface, the Youbou mill closure reinforced a pervasive sense that workers and communities in the province are increasingly vulnerable to an ever more globally integrated and footloose forest industry. But a funny thing happened in Youbou; the workers fought back. While the mill was completely dismantled and scrapped, with no...

This article argues that two different manifestations of rational behavior can coexist and collide in a relatively homogeneous society. In the Ticuna community of Arara in the Colombian Amazon; on the one hand, the majority of villagers tend to reach relatively lower levels of material wealth, following Polanyi's idea of the pre-modern man (1968a; 1968b; 1968c), and also Sahlins' (1972) idea of the original affluent man. On the other hand, community leaders and schoolteachers tend to...

This article relates contemporary Austria's much-discussed and internally contested identity politics to transnational socio-economic transformations and their far-reaching local/national effects. A qualitative analysis of (wide-ranging contributions to) current debates on the environment, food production, climate change, social inequality and welfare, higher education, art, migration, and unemployment reveals a recurring pre-occupation with expanding/encroaching markets, their advocated...

This article analyses the involvement of the Dalits (formerly 'untouchables') in the World Social Forum (WSF) processes. The focus will be on one networked organization in particular, the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR) as a key organization which served as a catalyst for linking the Dalit struggle against neoliberal globalization and casteism with the social forum process and the global justice movement. The article argues that the Dalit struggle, domestically and...