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This chapter brings Karl Polanyi into dialogue with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The dialogue is intended to make visible key aspects of Polanyi’s theoretical framework while also suggesting limitations in Piketty’s approach to political economy. Specifically, the authors use the concept of ‘predistribution’ – implicit in Polanyi – to critique Piketty’s emphasis on redistribution as the solution to growing wealth and income inequality. Predistribution...

In the last decades, Karl Polanyi has gained recognition as one of the most important social scientists of the twentieth century. His seminal book, The Great Transformation, is listed among twentieth- century classics. How can this book, written more than seventy-five years ago, be applied to the current conditions? In order to answer this question the chapter not only compares the civilization of the nineteenth century in Europe with our own epoch. It also reconstructs some of Polanyi’s...

Una pregunta clave que surge de la pandemia de coronavirus es qué se requiere para hacer de esta fase temporal un camino hacia el cambio transformador. O, como sucedió en gran medida después de la crisis financiera de 2008, ¿volverá la sociedad a una economía dominada por el crecimiento y cargada de carbono basada en una ética del individualismo radical y el consumismo desenfrenado, informada por recetas neoliberales? Este artículo se basa en el trabajo de Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) para...

Les analyses de Felix Schafer, alors le plus proche collaborateur de Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), permettent de comprendre un débat entamé en 1922 à Vienne entre Polanyi et Ludwig von Mises (qui était alors le représentant le plus célèbre de l’école autrichienne). Les enjeux de leur opposition devaient structurer la pensée polanyienne en son entier. Dans les décennies suivantes, notamment les années 1940-1950 aux États-Unis, c’est en esquissant une approche de type sociologique que Polanyi...

As factors of production, labor, money, and land play a role in economics that is rarely understood. The difficulty of deriving the contribution of the individual factor of production to the value of jointly produced final commodities (the famous “problem of imputation”) occupied generations of Austrian economists (Hayek 1984) and inspired Ludwig Mises to produce his 1920 article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (Mises 1935). Any attempt at rational socialist planning is...

The importance of the work of Karl Polanyi to social enterprise scholarship is often maintained. However, explanations as to how and why his ideas are so relevant to the field are still relatively scarce. In this essay, we argue that engaging with Polanyi’s work directly, and Polanyian scholarship more widely, can provide a deep understanding of the underlying assumptions within current social enterprise conceptualizations, and provide insights into how the relative positioning of market and...

The article considers alternatives to platform capitalism in a logic of Polanyian re-embedding. Stemming from case studies in the car-pooling, delivery and hosting sectors, the results uncover hybrid business models in which the market principle is used in the service of reciprocal logic. Rejecting the formal algorithmic rationality of capitalist platforms, the alternatives seek to align individual and collective behavior with values of solidarity and goals of general interest. They are...

In North America, uranium workers are fighting for their right to participate in a free-market system that provides them with small personal benefits. These workers experience powerlessness, instability, and unpredictability – or social dislocation – by living amidst capitalism’s polluted ecosystems, unstable economies, and disintegrating communities. However, they feel reliant on uranium for their livelihoods and strongly support the industry’s renewal and form sites of acceptance to...

This paper was inspired long ago by Jared Diamond (1997), and in particular by his extensive use of the concept of economic surplus as the key to the development of civilization. Unfortunately, Diamond does not mention the origin of the concept in classical and pre-classical economics, nor does he pay much attention to debates in economic anthropology about the role of economic analysis in studying primitive and ancient economic formations. These debates were the subject of a recent book by...

ABSTRACT A reading of Karl Polanyi’s work gives us a broader and more plural view of the development process beyond the exclusively economic dimension. This scientific text aims to recover the theoretical contribution of Karl Polanyi and its contribution to the understanding of the development process from a plural and substantive conception of economy. The key lesson learned in this research is that regardless of a country’s economic system, one should pay attention to the existing...

Der Artikel untersucht kollektives Interessenhandeln in der (Klein-)Kinderbetreuung in Deutschland und Österreich. Mit der Polanyi’schen Figur der Doppelbewegung werden die Dynamiken der aktuellen Aushandlungen im Feld der Sorge und Sorgearbeit aufeinander bezogen und analytisch gefasst. Die Bewegung in Form einer (Quasi-)Vermarktlichung steht im Spannungsverhältnis zum ausgeprägten Berufsethos der ErzieherInnen, um das sie durch Proteste (Österreich) und Streiks (Deutschland) kämpfen.

In a recent article for this journal, Stuart, D., Gunderson, R., and Petersen, B. [(2017). Climate change and the Polanyian counter-movement: carbon markets or degrowth? New political economy, 1–14. doi:10.1080/13563467.2017.1417364] discuss solutions to climate change in terms of Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double movement. They set up their argument as a critique of my own article on the topic to make the point that carbon markets do not constitute a genuine form of such countermovement....

Drawing on a detailed analysis of Grabher and König’s study of platformization (Grabher & König, 2020), this essay develops a revision of Actor-Network Theory by proposing how a Device, Representation, Actor and Network or a DRAN Approach can be more helpful in making sense of platform economic processes. First, it locates the ways in which Grabher & König’s article approach platforms from an updated Polanyian perspective. Second, it elaborates on how the aforementioned article...

The concept of “Polanyi’s momentµ should be applied not only to point out some general analogy between today’s economic and social crisis and the one which occurred between the two World Wars and provoked the breakdown of European liberal society. In fact, Polanyi’s work allows us to hypothesize a much deeper continuity between the two crises, where both represent different stages of the same interregnum, the same process of institutional metamorphosis. It hereby helps us to decode the deep...

As far right movements, social disintegration and international conflict emerge from the decay of the neoliberal order, Karl Polanyi's warnings against the unbridled domination of markets, is ever more relevant. The essays in Karl Polanyi for the 21st Century extend the boundaries of our understanding of Polanyi's life and work. They will interest Polanyi scholars and all interested in socialism and our future after neoliberalism. One asks whether, following Keynes and Hayek, Polanyi's...

This chapter argues that Karl Polanyi’s economic sociology offers foundational concepts for a radical analysis of the social and ecological conditions that have caused the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, it shows that Polanyi’s work, often claimed for social democracy, has the potential to provide much more radical insights into the question as to how to “re-embed” our economies, thereby leading to a fundamental rethinking about the ways in which the present crisis can be overcome.

Este ensayo pretende demostrar cómo el mercado autorregulado que pregonael neoliberalismo es una falacia y que tiende tarde que temprano a acabar odestruir las propias condiciones sociales, ambientales y culturales que aseguranla vida en el planeta. Basado en una globalización financierista, en la privatización yen la liberalización de mercado, ese modelo se ha convertido en la mayor fábrica deempobrecidos, logrando cooptar y subordinar a los Estados a sus designios a travésde las grandes...

An analysis of the connection between fascism and biopolitics in modernizing East Asia reveals that fascism served as colonial biopolitics, and was not historically specificity to Europe, though the rise of fascism was central to European colonialism and its technology of governance. As the last stage of capitalism, imperialism came with an expansion of social engineering in colonial countries, forcing colonized peoples to be “civilized.” I challenge the understanding of European fascism,...

Synthesizing material derived from Norbert Elias, Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner, in Part I the concept of “national character” is delineated as a special case of “habitus” relating to the socio-spatial scale of the nation state. In relation to problems of state-formation, national character is shown to be a figurational and co-developmental function of the system of nation-states in which patterns of mutual identification and “imagined...