Retour sur le désencastrement

Our ambition is to point out that a fresh look at what is usualy considered to be Karl Polanyi’s magnum opus, The Great Transformation, opens some new prospects on its analytical. This interpretation qualifies some of the Hungarian author’s main critics, directed against his concept of desembeddedness. With this aim in mind, we re-interpret this debate in epistemological terms, i.e. the link between concepts and reality ; then we try to connect Karl Polanyi with the notion of performativity, which is today flourishing, above all within the field of economic sociology.