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The rise of populism across Europe and the US – first in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis and then in the shape of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Brexit vote in 2016 – are indicative of a seismic shift in the terrain of economic ideas in public discourse. Settled liberal norms concerning ever-increasing international market expansion, and the political integration required to sustain it, have been decisively upset by political forces that, whilst once on the...

Despite its centrality to current debates about globalization and neoliberalism, aspects of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation remain poorly understood. This article places Polanyi in conversation with Weber, Nietzsche, and Foucault in order to explicate his genealogy of utopian liberalism. This mode of thought emerged in the late 18[sup th] century as a response to the mass pauperism of the Industrial Revolution in England. It substituted a mechanistic naturalism for the political and...

El artículo presenta un discurso del autor en la Conferencia de la Sociedad de Postgrado de Economía de la Universidad de Colombia, Nueva York, en 1950, acerca del análisis institucional a las ciencias sociales. Comenta sobre la relación entre tales ramas de las ciencias sociales como la historia, la economía y la antropología. ENG: The article presents a speech by the author at the Conference of the Graduate Society of Economics of the University of Colombia, New York, in 1950, about the...

Post-Keynesian institutionalist economists like Wallace Peterson and John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that the impact of uncertainty on economic wellbeing depends in part on the degree of control people have over the sources and consequences of it. Given the inability of government and other large institutions to reduce uncertainty or to provide citizens with the ability to manage it, mediating structures are considered as an alternative means of promoting economic security. The article...

The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism. By Tim Rogan (Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2017), pp.263 + viii. AU$48.82 (hb). Available in Australia through Footprint Books.

Although Karl Polanyi is best known for his theorization of market regulation and the double movement, democratizing the economic was one of his core concerns. He believed societies need to bring labor, land, and money under collective oversight to displace the logic of market fundamentalism with the logic of human needs. In this article, the author draws on Polanyi’s vocabulary to shed light on the denial of money politics and the possibility of democratization. The author illustrates these...

This paper presents a memorial to the great Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, with special emphasis on recent Japanese scholarship. To begin with, I affirm that for Polanyi “fictitious commodities” and “fictitious commodity markets" were key institutions of market society. Next I consider his assertion that the Poor Law controversy played a crucial role in introducing a competitive labor market into Britain from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century....

It seems with the ever more complex instituting of aggressive neoliberal renewal policies comes an intensified effort to use the language of consensus and civic unity. The post‐political debate frames this discussion, and it is from this perspective that we propose a fuller consideration of urban renewal policy, and how these forces are embedded within the narrowing of what has been called the “properly political”. In bringing together accounts of the dynamic political life of communities...

This article captures China's role in global manufacturing through the prism of conceptualisation of the commodification of labour power in Marxist theory. It argues that modalities of China's labour force co-optation in assembly and lower value added production for export of consumer goods to advanced economies carries more of a family resemblance with putting-out systems of the pre- capitalist era than with the commodification of labour power sensu stricto marking the capitalist era from...

There is a growing awareness that a whole-societal “Great Transformation” of Polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives. The mainstream Sustainable Development discourse, however, insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth-based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries. This article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of...

Ecological economics is largely about the ‘substantive’ (in ‘kind’) study of the economy, as opposed to a purely ‘formal’ economic analysis (in ‘money’). Following Kapp, Polanyi and others, this article argues that ‘substantive economics’ is interested in the biophysical and politico-institutional structure of the economy rather than in correct prices within a particular axiomatic conformity, as in ‘formal economics’. After outlining the history of the substantive vs. formal dichotomy, we...

Costly Fix examines the post-1995 Alberta tar sands boom, detailing how the state inflated the profitability of the tar sands and turned a blind eye to environmental issues. It considers the position of First Nations, the character and strength of environmental critiques, and the difficulties that environmental groups and First Nations have had in establishing a countermovement to market fundamentalism. The final chapter discusses how Alberta's new NDP government, in its first couple of...

In this article, we attempt to update the understanding of the external constraint in Latin America by examining the recent history of the region through the analytical framework of Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. As we argue, the greatest force behind today’s external restriction is the financial sector, much as it was a century ago. To reinforce this hypothesis, we provide the reader with relatively new historical material and with arguments made by scholars from diverse...

This paper explores some features of the development paths taken by Brazil and China (two member countries of the BRICS grouping) in the current context of the crisis of neoliberal globalization and transformation of the political and economic world order. The authors use Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ thesis to argue that newly emerging rural development (RD) dynamics in China and Brazil are part of a protective ‘countermovement’, driven by actors and institutions responding to the...

This paper analyzes the municipal development in Brazil from the theoretical design of Karl Polanyi. Methodologically, the Polanyi's city development index of Polanyi (IDMP). The results show that according to the concepts analyzed, the Brazilian municipalities, in their majority, have multidimensional incipient features and that there is a direct positive relationship between economic pluralism and quality of life levels. (English)

The role of the landlord class in Japan's prewar economic and political development has been widely debated. Moving beyond conflicting arguments of landlords as semifeudal exploiters or as the linchpins of rural market development, more recent research has emphasized the nonmarket institutions, often inherited from the Tokugawa era, in which the contractual relations between landlords and tenants were embedded. However, this research has overemphasized the continuity of the rural economy....

It is well known that Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation were written contemporaneously (between 1940 and 1943), that their authors propounded antithetical political ideologies (right-wing liberalism and left social democracy respectively), and that the two books revolve around a similar problematique: the causes of the collapse of liberal order in the interwar era. This chapter undertakes a detailed comparison of Hayek and Polanyi’s...