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The purpose of this paper is to contrast the work of Douglass North and Karl Polanyi regarding financial institutions associated in market economies. Both implicitly acknowledge the synergy between public and private financial markets, which can serve to solidify an alliance between wealth holders and the state, potentially at the expense of “sociery” at large. This alliance may stimulate growth, according to North, as well as impose the strain of the market, according to Polanyi. Taken...

This article outlines a post-rationalist approach to international political economy that factors in the role of affect in social causation. There are key historical junctures where social transformations cannot be neatly explained by instrumental logics, such as the profit motive or the pursuit of increasing productive efficiency. Affect, in the form of anxiety and aggression, overdetermines social behaviour in ways that belie conventional notions of rationality, premised on a clear...

Introduction: In February of 1941 Karl Polanyi wrote to his daughter Kari about his intention to submit to the publisher the first three chapters of the book The Great Transformation. The Origins of the Cataclysm. About the book, he wrote “[I]t will be a very straight-forward, simple story, easy to read and mainly historical in character”. A week later he added a post-script. Referring to the Notes in the manuscript, he wrote, “[T]he book is seemingly so simple and unsophisticated that...

This editorial considers the opportunities opened up for anthropologists by the financial crisis of 2008. The chief of these is the exposure of cracks in the intellectual hegemony of free-market economics which contributed to an unnecessarily defensive posture on the part of most anthropologists during the period of neoliberal globalization. The authors claim that anthropology can bridge the gap between everyday life and the world at large by combining the study of ideas and social actions....

Le concept d’encastrement s’est imposé dans la nouvelle sociologie économique. Ce texte souligne sa polysémie. Dans une première partie, il rappelle les deux acceptions politique et réticulaire respectivement adoptées par Granovetter et Polanyi. Rapportée à la modernité démocratique, la démarche de Polanyi permet de mettre en évidence un double mouvement caractérisant les rapports entre économie et société, dont les grands traits sont synthétisés dans la deuxième partie. Si l’on adopte une...

This paper sketches out some preliminary thoughts on political economy that stem from problematics that emerge from TWAIL. The TWAIL story of international law is one of frustration and disappointment because of the constant exploitation of the Third World despite all the historic changes in international legal ideas and institutions, but it also a story of hope in the moments of resistance. In order to better debate how particular international institutions should be changed or whether...

The essay, after trying to do a synthesis of today's debate about business and ethics, proposes to return to Karl Polanyi starting from a different meaning of the three founding principles proposed by the author (exchange, reciprocity and redistribution).

Economists are fond of proposing market solutions for many problems of resource allocation, while scholars from other social disciplines are often less inclined to adopt such solutions. In this essay I interpret the dichotomy for/against the market in the light of the one between neoclassical economics and the socio-anthropological tradition which originates with Karl Polanyi. In the first part, I suggest that this dichotomy runs in parallel to the one between facts and, which is typical of...

Adrian Pabst: Step aside, Keynes: the only economist to grasp the real limitations of capitalism and socialism was Hungarian

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi's basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: market society is Gesellschaft, while the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great...

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This paper will cover a wide range of issues. It will start with a reconstruction of the European Community’s ‘social deficit’, arguing that a credible response to this deficit would be a pre-condition for the democratic legitimacy of the deepened integration project. Such a response can be developed in a re-conceptualisation of European law as a new type of supranational/trans-statal conflict of laws – this is the thesis defended in the second section. This vision is contrasted in the third...

The main goal of this work was to theoretically conceptualise the process of marketisation which designates the transformation of society into a market economy and social relations into market relations. The starting point is first the comparative analysis of the definitions of the term market by some classic authors (Smith, Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Parsons), each of whom define it from their perspective as a monetary mechanism of exchange in the economic sphere of social activity. In the...

The global market continues to create the "great and permanent evils" so well outlined by Karl Polanyi in his book, The Great Transformatioit His description of the destructive effects of the emerging self-regulating market during the Industrial Revolution is reflected today in the ongoing erosion of social, environmental, and economic sustainability in both the North and the South. In this downward spiral of life parameters, fair trade opens up the possibility of a market where we all fit,...

Nations are the forms of political organization which peoples construct for themselves. It is a commonplace to state that globalization tends (for the better) towards the end of nations. However the history of capitalism shows that such a hypothesis is questionable. Globalization is merely a stage in the development of capitalism, which has always leaned on certain nations to secure its deployment: England in the past, the U.S. today. The real question is thus that of the hegemony of one...

This paper examines unconditional basic income schemes proposed by Philippe Van Parijs and by Ross Zucker in light of Karl Polanyi's analysis of the 1795 Speenhamland Law and of Esping-Andersen's use of decommodification as a signifier of social provisioning in welfare states. It discusses tradeoffs between productive advantages of market-based economies and dehumanizing disadvantages of commodified labor. Contemporary redistributive schemes such as those of Van Parijs and of Zucker extol...

This book approaches markets as a dynamic ensemble of institutions; and as a set of rules or norms, that contribute to the evolution of social systems of governance, and can be analysed as a structured social system. It tackles such questions as: * Where do markets come from and what drives their evolution? * How do organizations cope with the competitive dynamism of markets? * What is the role of governance mechanisms in the institutional coordination of markets? Using this 'new...

REVIEW: Genealogies of Citizenship is a remarkable rethinking of human rights and social justice. As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a...

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.