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Recently Claus Offe has raised the question concerning the fate of the European model of social capitalism. Can the model of social capitalism survive European integration amongst current tendencies? Offe assumes that this model has been challenged by the processes of globalisation and by the integration of postsocialist countries into the European Union. The working hypotheses of this article is that a relatively coherent answer to this question may be offered. The article is divided into...

This article proposes a neo-Polanyian theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics within contemporary market societies. It uses this framework to analyze the divergence between the United States and other developed societies that has become more pronounced in the first years of the twenty-first century. The argument emphasizes the shifting political alliances of the business community in the United States and suggests that from 1994 onward, business lost power in the right-wing...

The article examines the renewed interest in heterodox political economy. Institutionalists, post Keynesians, neo-Marxists, and feminists among others, and various sub-groups provide schools of thought on heterodoxy. The guidelines of institutional-evolutionary political economy (IEPE) are offered alongside socioeconomic analysis and complexity theories. The author outlines the conflict of individual v. structure. Other topics covered include social capital, heterogeneous agents, financial...

Argentina constitutes a revealing textbook case of the link between the liberal utopia of an auto-regulated market, commodity fetishism and economists' theories. How does economic liberalisation, backed by a law on currency convertibility, resolve the crisis of political representation affecting the country since the emergence of Peronism, the «voice of the voiceless», in the 1940s? The liberal utopia of markets' auto-regulation associates taking root in social life with having money, by...

This paper argues for a theoretical approach based on embeddedness which assumes that the economic actor is not an atomized and utilitarian individual, but is in fact positioned within specific historical and institutional contexts in various social networks. This approach is based on Polanyi's critically debated contribution which allows for an empirical study of the diversity of institutional structures and of the significance of configurations of insertion within different social...

This study contends that the various forms of archaic trade that anthropologists have reconstructed on the Northwest Coast of America are explanatory of plot-construction and characterization in Conrad's South-American novel. My thesis is that Nostromo is a figure defined by the practice of potlatch, and that his key presence in the plot entails the representation of a culturally dislocating transition from archaic transactions to modern commerce. The theoretical framework of this chapter...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of rising income inequality on the welfare state in East Asia. Specifically, I explore and test two causal links: 1) the effects of economic globalization on income distribution, and 2) the increase in income inequality on the prospect of socio-welfare policies. Building on Polanyi's politico-economic concept of "double movement," I hypothesize that rapid neoliberalization and financial globalization in East Asia since the early 1990s...

Feminist theory is often articulated as a series of categories of thought: liberal feminism, socialist feminism, Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, etc. These categories have aided the recent development of feminist thought, but their prevalence sometimes limits discussion to predicable perimeters. My argument begins from the observation that feminists often have very different responses to the rise of the market economy as a separate institution largely free of control by political...

This article unfolds in three stages. First, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing Europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. Second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. Finally, the article discusses the...

La pensée de Polanyi peut être vue comme une sorte de lieu géométrique entre des courants de pensée de gauche très divers, de la gauche de gauche au centre gauche. Cet article montre comment, entre 1995 et 1999, le nom de Polanyi a en effet servi de point de ralliement à des dizaines d’intellectuels (sociologues, économistes, philosophes...) connus en France et en Europe, ce qui n’a pas été sans impact politique. Une perspective toujours d’actualité ?, Polanyi’s throught can be seen as some...

Que peut-on retenir de l’œuvre de K. Polanyi en comparaison, notamment, de celles de Marx ou de Weber ? Cet article fait le point à la fois sur les contributions historiques et anthropologiques de Polanyi à l’histoire du marché et sur son aspiration à un socialisme associationniste, et il conclut que, audelà des nécessaires rectifications et actualisations, K. Polanyi reste la source d’inspiration principale pour un socialisme radical à visage humaniste., What must be kept of K. Polanyi’s...

While political turmoil is not new to Latin America, the tension between neoliberalism and democracy can help explain present-day turmoil. The current political situation in Latin America is the result of a disconnect between the goals of democracy, in particular, between social justice goals, upon which the legitimacy of democratic government rests, and the neoliberal economic policy of the region. Polanyi's concept of the always-embedded economy states that a market economy must be...

Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman's characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent...

Our understanding of the relationship between globalization and contemporary social welfare systems is heavily influenced by three conventional approaches to studying welfare reform: the political economy, moral economy, and mixed economy approaches.In addition to analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches, a central aim of this article is to introduce the social economy approach as an emergent alternative. Drawing from a growing body of work on institutional...

Questions arise whenever social-scientific models are used in analysis of ancient texts, particularly regarding the feasibility of their application to social and cultural milieux different from those from which they were derived. An essay I authored that assessed the command in Luke 6 to "love your enemies" from the perspective of ancient reciprocity ethics, and that invoked Marshall Sahlins's taxonomy of reciprocity relations (general, balanced, and negative reciprocity), was queried by...

On the terms of Karl Polányi's concept of the "Commodity Fiction" a theoretical conception of poverty is developed, which defines "absolute poverty" as a process, the terminal state of which is "annihilation". Within this process of "totalitarian consumption" consumer goods do not serve human needs in the first line but turn more and more into "consuming goods" which destroy the independence of human actors step by step and finally transform them into "cyborgs", i.e. creatures, whose lives...

In this review, we explore how the concept of embeddedness has shaped-and been shaped by-the evolution of the subfield of economic sociology. Although embeddedness is often taken as a conceptual umbrella for a single, if eclectic, approach to the sociological study of the economy, we argue that in fact the concept references two distinct intellectual projects. One project, following from Granovetter's (1985) well-known programmatic statement, attempts to discern the relational bases of...

Pour comprendre La Grande Transformation de Karl Polanyi, il faut la replacer dans le contexte des années 1930 et 1940, époque de contestation générale du vieux libéralisme « manchestérien ». L’article compare les positions de quatre auteurs contemporains : Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, Friedrich von Hayek et Walter Eucken. Cette comparaison montre d’abord que Polanyi n’était pas le seul à constater la fin du cycle libéral du capitalisme. Elle montre ensuite que la question portait aussi...

Through an examination of India's National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), the largest social movement alliance resisting neoliberal globalization in India, this paper attempts to theoretically reconstruct Polanyi's theory of (t the double movement" for the neoliberal age. Polanyi famously observed that early twentieth century liberal attempts to "dis-embed" the market from social controls created unprecedented social dislocations, leading to widespread protective (< countermovements...

I will endeavor here to retrace the major stages of life and career of Karl Polanyi and the genesis of his main ideas in the first part of the TWENTIETH century marked both by the occurrence of major disasters and the Effacement of the first market society that had taken shape in the nineteenth century.