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Substantivism stemmed from the writings of Hungarian lawyer-turned-historian Karl Polanyi, who argued that capitalism is a historically unique kind of economy that is disembedded from the social matrix. By implication, the socially embedded pre-capitalist economies studied by anthropologists, historians and classicists cannot be understood using the formal economics developed to analyze capitalist economies. Rather, new tools for analysing their 'substantive' economies must be employed....

The causes and consequences of revolutionary change have long been the subject of scholarly debate. Through a systematic integration of political economic elements into an analysis of contemporary social transformations, this article joins this conversation by asking how Karl Polanyi’s double movement framework can clarify, and be extended by, the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. By embedding a nuanced account of neoliberalism in Egypt’s modern politics and by bringing those in dialogue with...

This book offers a critical reconstruction of the double movement, the central thesis of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, one of the most influential books of the 20th century. The double movement is the establishment of a free market economy and the subsequent effort by society to ameliorate the destructive effects of the market. In Polanyi’s bold vision, the double movement constituted the hidden gear of social change and historical transformation within capitalism. The book is a...

For over a century, jurists have debated as to whether IP rights should be extended to this or that output such as photographs, computer programs, products of data aggregation, virtual objects, natural and organic materials, “creative” algorithms, and genes. What is surprising is the continuing and bifurcating discourse landscape: “IP law protects and rewards creativity” versus “IP law protects investment”. This paper suggests that IP law indiscriminately and simultaneously protected all...

Individual life in general; It is determined by political, economic and sociological structures. The main forces that shape these structures are the state, market and society, respectively. When the views of Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek on the state, market and society are considered comparatively, a holistic approach can be reached for understanding human life. In this context, the two thinkers have been the pioneers of two opponents lines in social sciences by putting forward opposite...

This article advances Rodrik's political trilemma of the world economy by using insights from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which helps to grasp the interwoven dynamics of long-term transformations due to climate change and geopolitical reordering on one hand, and on the other short-term political ruptures due to countermovements. Rodrik's globalization trilemma shows the incompatibility of hyperglobalization with the need for an enlarged democratic policy space. Its nodes...

The basic proposition of this paper is that the so-called "new economic sociology", which is rooted in key ideas of Karl Polanyi, is an indispensable "tool" for two tasks: a) it provides us with a powerful critique of market fundamentalism, and b) it allows us to analyze the economic performance of contemporary capitalism by accessing the working of its institutional structure. From an analytical perspective, the paper suggests that Polanyian Economic Sociology is an essential complement to...

The chapter offers an analysis of capitalist crisis through a reading and discussion of two seminal texts on capitalism, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy [1943] and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation [1944]. These inspiring works on economic history and social theory offer profound insights into the nature of capitalist crisis. Although written in the mid-twentieth century many of the insights in these books are of relevance to the current situation as capitalism...

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) est surtout connu pour son livre The Great Transformation, et en particulier pour une idée contenue dans celui-ci : la distinction entre une « économie intégrée dans les relations sociales » et « des relations sociales intégrées dans le système économique ». Selon cet auteur, les activités économiques et techniques  n’étaient d’abord qu’une des nombreuses excroissances des activités humaines. L’économie archaïque a donc été au service des besoins humains. Mais, au...

Este ensayo trata de situar la obra de Karl Polanyi en la tradición del pensamiento marxista heterodoxo, respondiendo a las objeciones que se han planteado en contra de tal filiación. Se analizan para ello los conceptos fundamentales del pensamiento del autor desde un punto de vista marxista: la “economía sustantiva” y la “economía formal”, la “falacia economicista”, la “incrustación” (Embeddedness) de la economía, las “mercancías ficticias” y el “doble movimiento”.

The article proposes to address the current discussions about national capitalism and the Argentine economy from a set of canonical ideas of the work of Karl Polanyi. Argentina, which for several decades has been going through recurring crises in its economic model, awakens a plurality of voices from social scientists and specialized journalists who debate the problems, limitations and projections of national capitalism. For this, we have surveyed these discussions, to a greater extent, from...

Karl Polanyi’s double movement is a key tool for conceptualising free market fatigue in African business communities wrought by the insecurities of trade liberalisation. Synthesising Polanyi with Kwame Nkrumah’s work on neo-colonialism, the article argues that exhausted business communities in Africa can contest free market reforms and push for a return to developmentalist strategies, underscoring a double movement. In this discussion it highlights Ghana, a ‘donor darling’ in terms of...

This chapter examines Polanyi’s institutional theory of market-capitalist society. It shows that market society is, according to Polanyi, a peculiarly “economic” society: its economy appears both autonomous and dominant, constraining the structure and evolution of other social subsystems. The chapter also demonstrates that Polanyi’s theory and method allow an explanation of the institutional transformations of market society. In the face of today’s great economic difficulties, social...

Institutional economics is a sociocultural discipline and policy science which draws on the idea that economies are best understood through an appreciation of history, real-world institutions, and socioeconomic interrelations. This book brings together leading institutionalists to examine the tradition’s most essential perspectives and methods. The contributors to the book draw on a broad range of institutional thought from the classic work of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl...

In this article we argue that reinvigorating socialist politics requires championing a socialist worldview that goes beyond the critique of capitalism. Neglecting such an outlook leaves socialism tethered to the fortunes of capitalism and inhibits a broader account of its own virtues. We begin by explaining why worldview thinking is appropriate today. Then we examine two underappreciated works by Karl Polanyi (his 1927 lecture “On Freedom”) and Charles Taylor (his 1974 essay “Socialism and...

This article discusses digitalization and its connection with the political economy of transformation. Its point of departure is Karl Polanyi's historical analysis as presented in The Great Transformation. Polanyi analyzed the development of “self-regulating” markets—with transformative and destructive consequences for individuals, nature, and society—and government efforts to contain these consequences. Polanyi's perspective is compared to Marx's theorem of the development of productive...

In this paper, I present an analysis of those aspects of Karl Polanyi's social and political thought that relate to environmentalism and 'green' politics today. I discuss whether or not he prefigured the degrowth movement, before focusing on his understanding of the New Deal (1933-1939). At the time of writing, the prospect appears likely of a return, at a global scale, of economic slump, mass unemployment and ecological crisis, the background conditions to which Franklin D. Roosevelt's New...

La riflessione di Karl Polanyi e Friedrich August von Hayek consente di analizzare da due punti di vista molto diversi la metodologia delle scienze sociali, la teoria adatta a studiare l'attività economica, l'organizzazione economica capitalistica e la società di mercato, le cause e il significato dei totalitarismi, il significato della libertà in una società complessa.