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As Karl Polanyi indicates in the 'Great Transformation',1'the so-called self-regulating markets cannot exist for any length of time without destroying human society'. Three 'Great Transformations' have taken place. The first occurred in Europe at a time when it was widely believed that markets were nature's way of managing exchange in an efficient way and that interference in the workings of the market, as Adam Smith argued, was not only artificial, but against the laws of God.2 The second...

In recent years, Karl Polanyi's concept of the “double movement” has been resurrected to describe growing international resistance to neoliberal global capitalism. The double movement originally referred to counter-movements for social protection against the 19th and early 20th century laissez-faire market. Today, it describes the growth of new social movements which often resist neoliberal economic practices and ideologies. Drawing on Polanyi's concept of the double movement and on recent...

Responses to the imposition of market-oriented economic policies have varied. This article asks two questions: (1) How can we better understand when marketization will or will not prompt resistance? And (2) when people do mobilize, why are some movements broad-based while others draw on particular segments of society? The author argues that these questions can best be answered by focusing not only on the political contexts and resources available to potential social movements, but also on...

Presents a development model for the recovery of the Irish polity post-2008 financial crisis and traces and compares the evolution of the development models of Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Ireland from 1987 to 2012, considering how those four countries managed the process of Europeanization. Explores the core Polanyian tension between markets and social protection, with particular reference to the capacity of selected small, open economies to manage that tension as compared with...

This introduction explains the logic of bringing together the perspectives of Hyman Minsky and Karl Polanyi to analyze processes of financialization. Although Minsky and Polanyi have very different intellectual trajectories, there are important complementarities in their approaches. The introduction also explains the focus of the three papers in this special section written by Kurtuluşc Gemici, Lucas Kirkpatrick, and David Woodruff. © 2015 SAGE Publications.

Many economists, including mainstream economists, have declared the necessity of an ambitious public investment program for Europe. The continuation of the present laissez-faire and austerity approach, they say, will deepen the dissatisfaction of European peoples with the European project. In effect, in the absence of inspiring progressive alternatives, there is the real prospect of nationalistic reactions everywhere, with fragmentation and the end of the EU (or even worse) as a consequence....

Karl Polanyi was one of the most influential political economists of the twentieth-century and is widely regarded as the most gifted of social democrat theorists. In Reconstructing Karl Polanyi, Gareth Dale draws upon primary sources archived in the countries that Polanyi called home—Hungary, Austria, Britain, the United States, and Canada—to provide a sweeping survey of his contribution to the social sciences.   Polanyi’s intellectual and political outlook can best be summarized through...

This chapter considers white European and American thinking on transatlantic slavery historically and, more briefly, in relation to today’s antislavery movement. Combining historical longue durée and a critical engagement with Nancy Fraser’s neo-Polanyian position, O’Connell Davidson shows that abolitionists were, and are, hard to fix as proponents of either market freedom or social protection, or indeed of ‘emancipation’. The postabolition experience of freed slaves shows that...

L’idée de « modèle social européen » n’est-elle qu’un leurre ou un objectif politique que les forces progressistes doivent continuer à promouvoir ? L’article s’interroge sur les fondements proprement philosophiques (souvent négligés) de l’État social – à la fois système assurantiel universel et institution d’un « citoyenneté sociale » (T.H. Marshall), dont la dynamique excède la forme de l’Etat-nation., Is the idea of a “European social model” but a decoy or is it a political aim that...

The sharing economy has generated enormous excitement with its promise of transforming work and consumption through technology and novel socio-economic relations. However, critics see the phenomenon as a further development of neoliberalism. Platforms such as Airbnb and TaskRabbit, monetize a previously uncommodified realm of life via renting of bedrooms, possessions, space and labor time. In this paper, we analyze the meanings and attitudes of sharing economy participants. On the basis of...

A fundamental methodological problem is the relevance of an antagonism of capitalism. This needs to be classified in light of the developmental stage of the means of production: far too little attention is paid to the contradictory character of individualization and socialization. This brings us to Karl Polanyi's main argument of disembedding. He also deals with a shift from the socially integrated (and dependent) individual to the utilitarian market citizen. The French regulationist theory...

Are you a Bernie Sanders supporter? Chances are you'll like Karl Polanyi, too. An explainer.

A commentary on Asad Zaman's paper “The Methodology of Polanyi's Great Transformation”

This paper examines the long-run fluctuations in growth and distribution through the prism of wage- and profit-led growth. It argues that the relation between distribution of income and growth changes over time and proposes an endogenous mechanism that leads to fluctuations between wage- and profit-led periods. The ephemeral character of distribution-led regimes needs to be taken into account when someone estimates empirically the effect of a change in distribution on utilization and growth....

In economic geography and economic sociology, embeddedness refers to the ways in which relational, institutional, and cultural contexts shape economic life. In contrast to the undersocialized and utilitarian assumptions of neoclassical economics, rational choice theory, and new institutional economics, theories of embeddedness focus on the ways in which markets and society are variously articulated in particular societies, organizations, and places. Embeddedness in this sense is associated...

This paper focuses on how discourses of food have shaped understandings of what is at stake in the Greek crisis. Drawing from Karl Polanyi's concept of "embeddedness," I argue that food is central to Greek interpretations of neoliberal policies and processes because of its centrality to Greek culture and identity. Food has also been a site of contested practices of "solidarity" and "charity" by which new social experiments are emerging in the wake of the breakdown of the welfare state. In...

The rise of for-profit law schools in the United States highlights the interplay of political and moral economy in the reproduction of legal expertise. This article offers ethnographic evidence from one ABA-accredited for-profit law school pseudonymously labeled New Delta School of Law. The article posits New Delta as a case study in market fundamentalism of the kind first theorized by Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi. Polanyi defined global capital as a “double movement” between free...

All communities of practice must face questions relating to the material economic foundations of future sustainable societies. David Graeber, Karl Polanyi and Karl Marx each have produced typologies of possible types of economy, synthesised as: (1) the principle of individual reciprocity, (2) the market principle of capitalism, and (3) the planning principle of the state. I apply this synthesis to recent proposals for community change advanced by Bill McKibben and David Korten concerning...