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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...

This article originated with a puzzle : how best to account for changes in the behavior of groups, organizations and individuals in Great Britain ? A detailed analysts of what Weber and Polanyi identified as interdependencies between state and market, and of the state's role in creating the market, led to the decision to adapt the notion of bureaucratic revolution put forward by Weber. We argue that the British bureaucratic revolution is reflected in the fact that the state plays an...

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...

KM: a review article on Nafissi's book.

The traditional ethnic entrepreneurship paradigm suggests that resource mobilization based on ethnic group membership and the particular structural conditions of the economy and society combine to facilitate ethnic enterprise. Yet, this model remains largely descriptive and imprecise with respect to how and why class and ethnic resources and structural opportunity matter. Furthermore, this approach neglects to consider the likelihood that other non-ethnic social groupings distinct from...

While Polanyi argues that all economies are embedded and enmeshed in social relations and institutions, he tends to see market economy as disembedded, which reveals a tension in his thought. The main motivation for this paper is to understand the origins of this tension. On the basis of a systematic formulation of Polanyi's work, it is argued that Polanyi employs embeddedness in a dual manner: (a) as a methodological principle akin to methodological holism, and (b) as a theoretical...

The overarching question raised in this special issue is whether societies can, do or indeed should steer new and emergent science and technological development and its management on to trajectories construed as more or less 'desirable'. It therefore sits at the interface of two arenas. These are governance: processes of shaping/steering emergent technologies and markets; and sustainability: normative agendas incorporating a range of potentially competing conjectures and internally...

Based on the unpublished Kapp-Polanyi correspondence, the paper analyzes the relationship between the two economists, as well as the meaning and origin of substantive economics, i.e. one of the key concepts of institutional economics with distinctly European roots. The correspondence shows how both economists influenced each other in their similar understanding of the substantive economy, and reveals that these similarities and the mutual influence date back to the 'planning debate' of the...

Let me start with a bit of wisdom I once picked up from Thomas Berry, a historian of cultures who has said, “The universe is the communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” This epigraph encapsulates the monumental shift that I believe we are undergoing as we move into a new kind of cultural if not economic reality. This article was originally published in the Fall | Winter 2008 issue of Kosmos Journal. To download a PDF version of this article, please click here.

Essais, Karl Polanyi : L’ouvrage qui vaut à Polanyi une renommée mondiale ( La Grande Transformation paru en 1944) ne fut traduit en français qu’en 1983, signe (et cause aussi) d’une trop longue négligence pour un auteur désormais reconnu pour son apport incontestable aux sciences humaines et sociales ENG translation: The book which earned worldwide fame Polanyi (The Great Transformation, published in 1944) was not translated into French in 1983, a sign (and also because) of too long...

The purpose of this work is to analyze the Karl Polanyi’s conceptions about the pre-capitalist-markets, especially his revision of the categories of trade, money and market. In first place, we present a critical examination of the fundamental ideas of The Great Transformation, where his later reflections about pre-industrial societies are ground. Using some basic categories of the critique of political economy, we treat to show certain methodological and conceptual limits of his proposal....

European integration is usually studied within the realms of comparative politics. The multitude of empirical studies concerning the topic have been well suited to its numerous methodologies and analytical frameworks. Comparative politics however, usually ignores the question of why European integration has both progressively deepened and widened during the last thirty years. Therefore there is a distinct absence of how developments in the global political economy determine European...