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In this article I discuss Polanyi's intellectual formation in early twentieth-century Budapest and in 1920s Vienna, focusing in particular upon his relationship to Guild Socialist and Marxist theory and to Austrian Social Democracy. It was a period in which Marxism was evolving rapidly, and Polanyi was too. In his twenties, he reacted forcefully against what he saw as the evolutionary and deterministic traits of Marxist philosophy. In his thirties, his relationship to Marxism underwent a...

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of many countries around the world where the relationship between customary land tenure and economic development has been hotly debated for a long time. A commonplace of the debate in PNG is that 97% of the nation's land is held under customary tenure, while only 3% has been alienated, and these proportions have not changed since the country became independent in 1975. This paper shows that the boundary between customary and alienated forms of land or immovable...

Economics and the economy have an uneasy relationship. Economics is akin to the logic of mathematics in contrast to the term "economy," which is an institutional framework to provide for material wants. While they overlap in the modern market economy, economics provides distorted results when applied to tribal societies, the economies of antiquity, or modern state-organized economies. Harold A. Innis and Karl Polanyi both attempted to find a different conceptual framework for a truly general...

In this paper, we critically assess two of the key conceptual foundations for the comparative capitalisms (CC) literatures, neo-pluralist political science and economic sociology, in order to identify more clearly the deep intellectual roots of these literatures. Principally, we focus on how the strengths of neo-pluralism and economic sociology – their attention to detail in considering the huge range of ‘types’ of capitalism that exist across the world – come at a high price. Put briefly,...

This article discusses some alternative or critical theoretical contributions regarding globalization and labor. The main question in this discussion is if there are changes in direction of a possible revitalization of labor movements and if international solidarity can increase due to globalization. This question also relates to discussions of changes in division of work, the concept of work, working class, commodification, decommodification, and new centers of global production--all...

For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programmes, by filling the void left by the “rolling back” of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalisation. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss group learning in line with economic perspectives of embeddedness and integration emanating from the work of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi’s work defines economy as a necessary interaction among human beings for survival; the economy is considered inextricably linked from broader society and social relations rather than autonomous and driven by self-interest in free market conditions. He specifically outlines three key forms of integration that are crucial to...

This article examines from a care approach the social and institutional responses to the development of the market economy in the European context. Studying this long period -which Polanyi called the double movement- is relevant because it constitutes the historical process by which the interests of the market, the logic of profits and its social and scientific naturalization come to dominate. Since then, the importance of care work in people's life, the reproduction of the labour force, and...

Karl Polanyi's critique of market society is a very powerful tool for understanding our current social reality. It helps us to formulate a creative and purposeful proposal that contributes to build a just, equitable, and more humane society, that would be committed to the future life on the planet. A comparison between the society criticized by Polanyi and ours, leads us to discover the validity of his basic concepts and his method for the preparation of a new critical discourse that not...

The article presents selected aspects of the discussion about the conditions and consequences of global economic crisis in Polish sociology. The author argues that the relatively limited debate on the nature of the current crisis can be explained by two factors. Firstly, it is the consequence of the dominance of modernisation paradigm in the analysis of the Polish social transformation as well as the marginalisation of two sociologies: critical labour sociology and economic sociology....

Purpose -- This paper furthers the analysis of patterns regulating capi-talist accumulation based on a historical anthropology of economic activ-ities revolving around and within the Mauritian Export Processing Zone (EPZ). Design/methodology/approach -- This paper uses fieldwork in Mauritius to interrogate and critique two important concepts in contemporary social theory -- "embeddedness" and "the informal economy." These are viewed in the wider frame of social anthropology's engagement with...

El artículo se centra en la vida y obra del historiador Karl Polanyi, quien escribió el libro "La Gran Transformación", en 2014 y también discute la investigación realizada sobre la vida económica de las sociedades primitivas por Polanyi.

This article attempts to combine the Polanyian perspective on the issue of market societies with an the analysis of the institutional foundations of capitalism that is facilitated by the Varieties of Capitalism(VoC) approach. The article departs fromthe argument that the VoC school has upgraded our insight into the institutional working ofmodern capitalism, but became entrapped in an overt structuralismwhich considers institutional change as just an interplaywithin a self-odering...

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...

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...