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Using Karl Polanyi's analytical instrument, I argue that the current withdrawal of the industrialized powers and the emergence of alternative policies in Latin America are determined by the crisis of the neoliberal model. The polarity between democracy and the market, observed since the beginnings of liberal capitalism, has deepened since the inter-war period due to the appearance of so-called "mass democracy." Since that period, foreign policies of industrialized countries have derived from...

Underpinning this article is the proposition that regional integration with a social dimension has the potential to engender a more equitable pattern of globalisation. The empirical focus of the article is on the ex)tent to which the insights of 'embedded liberalism' associated with regional economic integration between he industrialised nations of the European Union (EU)can be applied to regional economic integration within sub-SaharanAfrica. The article contends that EU market...

This paper examines the declining support for centrist parties in many western countries. Using the seminal ideas of Karl Polanyi, the paper argues this decline is attributable to the rise of neo-liberal free market policies that have resulted in widespread insecurity and led many voters to seek out political alternatives on the right and left. The paper further examines possible reasons why parties of the right, rather than the left, have been more successful at this historical juncture in...

This thesis proposes a new counter-narrative to the neo-liberal agenda that combines two seemingly disparate bodies of work: New Governance and Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice. New Governance is a new and rapidly growing strand of legal thought and practi ce that has simultaneously developed a following in Europe and the United States. In short, legal scholars in this field of research are advocating a shift away from long-standing command-style, fixed-rule regulation toward more...

The article discusses the emergence of millennialism, which is considered as one of the outcomes of the spiritual victory of Christianity over the Greco-Roman culture. The formulation of the historical-sociological category of cultural catastrophe by Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi is tackled. The presence of a divine messenger as one of the three elements of a messianic movement is cited. The concepts of revolutionarism, Jacobinism and Marxism are also addressed.

The paper examines Nancy Fraser’s Polanyian reading of the current capitalist crisis and her expansion of Polanyi’s notion of the ‘double movement’–social forces struggling for marketization and social protection– into a ‘triple movement’ by adding the struggle for emancipation as a third factor. In its first part, the paper reviews Fraser’s central arguments with a special focus on her reading of Polanyi’s idea of the “fictitious commodities” land, labor, and money. Second, the authors...

The aim of this paper is to discuss the concept of civil war during the Thirties (1929-1939). To this purpose, the work analyses the development of the Civil War discourse in the thought of Carl Schmitt and Karl Polanyi, trying to focalize on the relationship between its consequences on the civil war and the conflicting ideologies which characterised that period. Hence, the Civil war is described, through these different narrations, showing two different sides of modernity: the destructive...

Depuis les années 1980, de plus en plus de pays ont opté pour une économie de marché et un régime politique de type démocratique et ce, indépendamment de leur « niveau de développement ». Pourtant, marché et démocratie ne sont pas directement compatibles. Si tous deux reposent sur les principes de liberté et d’égalité, le premier mise sur le pouvoir émancipateur du marché libre, alors que la seconde suppose une certaine égalité des conditions de vie. Une lecture croisée de cas européens et...

While concentrating on the rise of modern capitalism, Weber’s seminal studies have little to say about the impact of religions on contemporary economic development. The paper comments about recent approaches to find an answer to the questions Weber left open. If one disregards a priori constructions of culturalist and rational-choice-theories, these approaches end up again in restating the circular relationship between ideas and interests showed already by Weber, albeit clearly with a higher...

In contemporary political economic analyses of development processes, Hernando De Soto'sThe Mystery of Capital, has been one of the most discussed, albeit controversial, books. Although well received by global development agencies such as the World Bank, a key exponent of De Soto's work, positing that the creation and institutionalisation of individual property in housing and land revives “dead capital” and creates the conditions that will enable the poor to emerge from abject poverty, has...

This article argues that thinking about entrepreneurship as a potential instrument for relief from endemic poverty and disadvantage, especially among the Indigenous, has all too often been captive to a concept of entrepreneurship that is built out of constrained economic and cultural assumptions. The authors develop this argument from a critical discussion of contributions by Karl Polanyi and Robert Heilbroner. The result is that approaches to venture have been encouraged that are sometimes...

This special issue asks what role society can play in the regulation of transnational risks, as an alternative to or at least significant addition to reliance on state regulatory activity and the myth of the self-regulatory capacity of markets (Stiglitz, 2001, p. xiii). How can a social sphere contribute to the prevention and management of risks, often transnational in nature, posed by economic activity? Leading socio-legal scholars explore whether and how the idea of harnessing the...

This article identifies a triple crisis of capitalism based on the three fictitious commodities as identified by Karl Polanyi: labour, money and land. This framework is used to integrate the environmental crisis into the wider crisis of capitalism. It argues that international actions required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are going to present major challenges for capitalism with implications for the current dominance of market power and the subservience of state and social power. The...

Public service labour’s distinctiveness is insufficiently understood or recognised; and in its ad hoc growth under liberal ideologies of state intervention (those of Mill and Keynes), it has been treated both as if it were and were not public service labour. This paper teases out some of the crucial links between liberal ideologies of state intervention and the social praxis of public service unionism, outlining the latter’s historical struggle against this paradoxical treatment, which...

This paper first explores the notion that the limitlessness of knowledge is a privileged source of the restlessness of capitalism [Metcalfe, J. S. 2001. “Institutions and Progress.”Industrial and Corporate Change10 (3): 561–586; 2002. “Knowledge of Growth and Growth of Knowledge.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics12 (1): 3–13; 2004. “The Entrepreneur and the Style of Modern Economies.”Journal of Evolutionary Economics14 (2): 157–175; 2010. “University and Business Relations: Connecting the...

This paper outlines a ‘substantivist’ approach to the regional economy of the Pilbara in Western Australia, inspired by a constructive reinterpretation of Karl Polanyi's methodological legacy. Beyond the metaphor of embeddedness, it makes the case for a more wide-ranging methodological engagement with Polanyi's brand of substantivist socioeconomics, in dialogue with the empirical investigation of actually existing and variegated socioeconomic formations. A Polanyian optic, amongst other...

In this article, we compare recent innovative union campaigns: the ‘sans papiers’ campaign in France and the ‘Justice for Cleaners’ campaign in the United Kingdom, both based on a sustained grass-roots mobilization of immigrant workers. Rather than focusing on the ‘usual suspect’ explanatory factors, such as contrasting national settings, union power structures or traditions, our cross-national comparison highlights important underlying similarities in unions' strategic responses to a...

The housing of low-income groups in Greater Cairo has always been difficult. However, the general shortage in housing supply is contrasting with the low occupancy rate of newly constructed public housing units. In contrast, despite their bad living conditions, informal settlements have a high occupancy rate. In order to analyse the reasons behind this contradiction, the paper compares four neighbourhoods ranging from formal and semi-informal to informal housing production and including one...