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The purpose of this article is to discuss what has being disseminated and reproduced as local development, seeking to understand the problems arising from this phenomenon, particularly highlighting the promotion of market-oriented cities. We question the processes of development and public policies, advancing in the debate based on Karl Polanyi's double-movement thesis duly revisited and updated historically and geographically. As contributions, we highlight the engagement with...

The Democratic Party's current left-wing resurgence shows that significant popular support exists for an expanded vision of fundamental rights for all people: rights to public health care and higher education; affordable housing; living-wage jobs; and a Green New Deal that transitions human society to ecological sustainability while also reducing inequality. But what are the best institutional means to provide this expanded vision of fundamental rights? This paper argues that we must stop...

Neoliberalism means “new liberalism.” It could be dated back to 18th century, but it is a term that belongs today. Since 1990, neoliberal rules gave many harmful effects, especially to developing countries, and those harmful effects have proceeded for labor class. As capitalism stands on its own feet, it can find solutions to regain profits. However, the concern may well be gaining too much profit gives harmful effects on a wide range of social classes. Neoliberalism is accepted as the tool...

Presenting a profound and far-reaching analysis of economic, ecological, social, cultural and political developments of contemporary capitalism, this book draws on the work of Karl Polanyi, and re-reads it for our times. The renowned authors offer key insights to current changes in the relations between the economy, politics and society, and their ecological and social effects.

Since the crisis of 2008 the liberal market order has been challenged by several (populist) social movements and has become object of political regulation. Whereas in the late 70s and early 80s politics tend to deregulate the market, nowadays deregulation seem to be a synonym for the negative externalities of a free global market. Following Polanyi (The Great Transformation, 1944), societies with market market economies tend to experience a double movement - the Polanyi's Pendulum - between...

A remarkable transition to a renewable energy economy (also known as the Energiewende) with ambitious climate protection and sustainable economic development is taking place in Germany, with many German cities exemplifying best practices in effective climate leadership to attain ambitious climate goals, such as Munich (1.4 million) moving steadily to its targets of 100% renewable energy by 2025 and 100% renewable heat by 2040. Similarly, the former coal city of Bottrop in West Germany won...

This article suggests cautious optimism toward the prevailing Polanyian countermovement discourse by providing a timely and comprehensive examination of the enforcement of the labour dispatch regulation in China. Since the enactment of the regulation, some enterprises have narrowed the remuneration gap between agency workers and formal employees, while others have retained a large gap in overtime pay, bonuses, and welfare benefits between these two groups of workers. The regulation has...

The article focuses on analysis of Karl Polanyi in the book "The Great Transformation" which explained the changes in Great Britain from eighteenth-century mercantilism to nineteenth-century free markets to the state-centered interventionism of the mid-twentieth century evident when he was writing. It mentions additional features needed for understanding the evolution of development thought and repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, leading to free trade in agricultural products.

This text aims at accounting for the plurality of money by emphasizing the delicate and evolving balance of the legal monetary systems and the continued existence of moneys that stay outside, though their continuation is subjected to chronic difficulties. It uses Polanyian concepts to take the wide and increasing variety of money into account and mobilizes criteria able to analyse the variety of links between them. It proposes a framework based on the representation of a "plurality triangle"...

Post-apartheid Durban civil society politics reflects not only durable anti-racist activism, but primarily, Karl Polanyi's pendulum of a 'double movement' of the market against people and environment on the one hand, and social backlashes against neoliberalism on the other. The most important movements and campaigns of a socioeconomic nature can be summarised as follows: local resistance to economic disempowerment and lack of service delivery in various trade union strikes (1994-present),...

Written originally on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, this article critically analyses how the ideas of Hayek and Polanyi have been deployed to understand neoliberalism. It argues that dominant scholarly interpretations tend to miss the significance of each thinker to an understanding of neoliberalism, as well as some of the key dynamics of neoliberal forms of capitalist regulation....

Economic geographers have recently taken up the study of markets after a long period of inattention. This growing literature has highlighted the diverse spaces, scales, and fields where markets are present, as well as the ways in which markets vary in form. However, the study of markets in economic geography still exists in tension between neoclassical and Marxist conceptions of markets as predictable and approaches like the social studies of economization/marketization which emphasize their...

This article explores the concepts of spontaneity and spontaneous order, in particular their deployment by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi. Although in many respects these thinkers were poles apart, the article identifies a point of convergence. They both mobilize the concept of spontaneity in a manner that naturalizes a particular social process: for Hayek, the market economy, for Polanyi, society’s protective movement that arises in reaction against the market economy. To contextualize...

Democracy is in serious difficulties. Three features of the crisis stand out. First is the dominant culture of disillusionment in democracy, which transpires as the mistrust in constitutionalist institutions and values. Second, political authority, both at domestic and international levels, is largely substituted by the rule of non-transparent and unpredictable social powers. Third, democratic states are deprived of much of their capacity to govern, but they retain a non-negligible capacity...

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi offers a ‘top-down’ analysis of the rise and demise of Europe’s unregulated market system. He assumes that changes in the organization of the international economy provide particular kinds of opportunities for states to act which, in turn, shapes the extent to which social forces will be able to influence state policy. Consequently, his analysis focuses, first, on the international institutions created by the self-regulating market system; then on...

After the financial crisis of 2007-08, many commentators, adopting a broadly Polanyian logic of reasoning, expected a departure from neoliberalism. The failure of this shift to materialize has typically been accounted for in ‘exceptionalist’ terms: the persistence of neoliberalism is understood not as a function of a specific legitimacy it has itself engendered, but in terms of external interventions by elites who manage to ‘capture’ executive and regulatory institutions and so to bypass...

Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek are often portrayed as implacable intellectual opponents but their respective historical trajectories suggest some telling similarities. Here we describe some key similarities in their approach to markets, as a prelude to evaluating the political consequences of relying upon their Austrian conceptions of nature-based and constructivist framing of markets. Perhaps it is time to transcend their dichotomy.