Avec Mauss et Polanyi, vers une théorie de l'économie plurielle - Laville, Jean-Louis (Revue du MAUSS, 2003)
Mauss and Polanyi sketched the theoretical foundations of a pluralist approach to the economy and began a reflection on social change that was not satisfied with the ritual evocation of a reversal of the system. In other words, instead of an abstract call to an alternative economy, the concrete path of "altereconomies" opens the field of possibilities.
Keywords: altereconomies

Employment, flexible working and the family - Crompton, Rosemary (The British Journal of Sociology, 2002)
This paper assesses some of the implications of one of the major social changes to have taken place in the West during the second half of the twentieth century — that is, the increased employment of women, together with normative changes in gender relations and in women's expectations. These changes have been linked to an increase in individualism, which itself is associated with the transcendence of ‘first modernity’. Thus it is suggested that new approaches to social analysis are required (Beck). Here it is argued that, rather than develop completely new approaches in order to grasp the changes that are under way, the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ (that is, employment and the family) should be seen as intertwined, rather than approached as separate phenomena. Past debates in feminism, changes in the family, and flexible employment are critically examined. The growing tensions between employment and family life are discussed. It is argued that these changes are associated with the intensification of capitalist development, rather than reflecting a fundamental transformation of society. Existing approaches to the analysis of social change, including Polanyi's analysis of the development of ‘counter-movements’ against the ‘self-regulating’ market, will, therefore, still be relevant to our enquiries. In the concluding section, a programme of research that would examine these changes is outlined.
Keywords: capitalism; family; flexible employment; gender; modernity

Theorizing the 'Third Sphere': A Critique of the Persistence of the 'Economistic Fallacy.' - Adaman, Fikret; Madra, Yahya M. (Journal of Economic Issues, 2002)
The paper seeks to investigate, from a methodological and ontological perspective, different ways of theorizing the third sphere--the set of activities that can be captured by neither the price mechanism of the markets nor by governmental transactions. The first aim is to elucidate the constitutive elements of the third sphere by deploying Polanyi's forms of integration (reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange). The second is to survey the ontologically individualist and methodologically formalist literature on the third sphere. After elucidating the coexisting sets of behavioral essences in contemporary ontologically individualist and methodologically formalist models of third-sphere activities, the paper claims that this proliferation of behavioral essences can only lead to a methodological impasse. The paper concludes that only with a committed recognition of the heterogeneity of the economy and the endogeneity of the economic subject will it become possible to better grasp the richness of third sphere activities.
Keywords: current heterodox approaches: institutional; economic methodology; economistic fallacy

Chapter 7: Karl Polanyi - Rogerson, Kenneth S.; May, Christopher (Key Thinkers for the Information Society, 2002)
This article presents Karl Polanyi's analysis of the dynamic relationships between economy and society in the information age. Of the many concepts Karl Polanyi provides in his analysis of economic relations, three stand as carefully calculated assumptions about the relationship between society and economy: the embeddedness of information in society, the commoditization of information and the existence of a double movement in the information revolution. Information has always been embedded in societal interactions. To emphasize this point, he said that the simple flow of information seems to have little effect in and of itself on the outcome of social interchanges. In Polanyi's words, it is also embedded in other social relations, such as political, economic, cultural, or health-related discussions and actions. On the issue of information commoditization, Polanyi takes a different view. His logic indicates that there will be negative social consequences associated with it. One example is digital divide or the discrepancies on a global or national level between those who have access to information through new technologies and those who do not. With regards to the existence of double movement, Polanyi believed that there are two opposing forces-economic liberalism and social protection-present during the industrial revolution. However, this is not easy to see in the information age because of simple paradox. First, people who would eschew the uses of technology for ideological reasons,may turn to it for other reasons. And second, there is only a protest of a specific issue and not the imbalance of information flows or the ownership of information dissemination methods.
Keywords: commercialization; communication revolution; digital divide; industrial revolution; information technology; liberalism

Politics, the state and the impulse for social protection : the implications of Karl Polanyi's ideas for understanding development and crisis - Putzel, James (London School of Economics Crisis States Research Centre working papers series 1, 18., 2002)
This short paper discusses how some of Karl Polanyi's key ideas can help shed light on the processes of development and crisis in the world today. It begins by taking up the role of economic liberalisation and the state. Then it discusses Polanyi's identification of the 'impulse' for 'social protection' and suggests it is crucial to an understanding not only of the role of the state in development but also politics in the developing world. It finishes by applying some of these ideas to understanding the actions of 11th September, and the crisis related to terrorism in the developing world today.
Keywords: development; economic theory; political institutions; social history; social problems; social protection; social reform

Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century - Blyth, Mark (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Mark Blyth argues that economic ideas are powerful political tools as used by domestic groups in order to effect change since whoever defines what the economy is, what is wrong with it, and what would improve it, has a profound political resource in their possession. Blyth analyzes the 1930s and 1970s, two periods of deep-seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century. Viewing both periods of change as part of the same dynamic, Blyth argues that the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by "embedding liberalism" and the 1970s, those who benefited least from such "embedding" institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. In Great Transformations, Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible and he rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place. Mark Blyth is an assistant professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University specializing in comparative political economy. He has taught at Columbia University, and at the University of Birmingham, UK. Blyth is a member of the editorial board of the Review of International Political Economy.
Keywords: economic policy; political economy; political science; public policy

Anomie, Social Change and Crime - Bernburg, Jon Gunnar (British Journal of Criminology, 2002)
The last decade has seen a revived interest in using anomie theory in crime and deviance research. The present paper contributes to this development by offering an examination of a particular extension of anomie theory, namely, Messner and Rosenfeld's Institutional-Anomie theory. Explicating Institutional-Anomie theory relative to the sociologies of Durkheim, Merton and Polanyi, I find that this theory goes beyond Merton by using a strain of thought that is critical of liberal society. By bringing in the notion of the disembedded market economy, a central notion in the institutionalism of Polanyi and Durkheim, this theory links crime, anomie, and contemporary social change. I also discuss some of the limitations of linking crime with societal level processes in a Durkheimian rather than Mertonian manner.
Keywords: DURKHEIM, Emile; MERTON, Robert; anomie; crime; criminology; disembeddedness

Place, Capitalism, and Democratic Efficacy - Kogl, Alexandra (Conference Papers -- American Political Science Association, 2002)
Keywords: DELEUZE, Gilles; capitalism; democracy; democratic; economy; efficacy; empire; place; political; theory

The Great Transformation at Sea: Fictitious Commodities and the Crisis of Marine Fisheries - Ziegelmayer, Eric (Conference Papers -- American Political Science Association, 2002)
Challenging contemporary debates concerning the regulation of ocean fisheries, this paper deploys theoretical insights developed by Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the consequences of the establishment of market economy upon European society, and thereby upon the entire planet. The concept of the self-regulating market, according to Polanyi was based on three "commodity fictions" of land, labor and money; the extension of this concept to all of the economic institutions of society he called "market utopianism." This paper extends Polanyi’s fictitious commodity thesis to the living resources of the ocean and argues that the roots of the contemporary problems of the world’s fisheries originate in the exposure of nature to a market economy. Concerned with the future governance of ocean resources and democracy in fishery regulation, the paper examines the globalization of the fishing industry in comparative and historical perspective to illuminate the validity of Polanyi’s theory. While there can be no final agreement as to the constitution of "good society", a useful starting point for debate is provided by the work of Karl Polanyi. A good society, he claims, is a society capable of producing goods, and a necessary condition of life in such a society is that human beings and nature are not treated as commodities
Keywords: capitalism; democracy; economy; fictitious commodities; fisheries; fishery policy; political; property; rights; saltwater fishing

Market Liberalism and Social Protection: Hayek, Durkheim and Polanyi in Theoretical Perspective - Akturk, Sener (Journal of Academic Studies, 2002)
Examines the views of neoclassicist Friedrich A. Hayek, sociologist Emile Durkheim and Karl Polanyi on liberalism. Relationship between the individual, the market economy and society; Features of Hayekian neoclassical economics; Information on Polanyi's book 'The Great Transformation.'
Keywords: DURKHEIM, Emile; Great Transformation, The (Book); HAYEK, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992; liberalism; social protection

Chronik der grossen Transformation. Artikel und Aufsätze (1920-1945) / Wirtschaftliche Transformation, Gegenbewegung und der Kampf um die Demokratie - Cangiani, Michele; Thomasberger, Claus; Polanyi, Karl (Metropolis, 2002)
ENGLISH: In the last few years the interest in Karl Polanyi's work has been growing between 1920 and 1945, and with only a few exceptions they are difficult or impossible to access. The articles, essays, and manuscripts written in Vienna and England are not only the result of intensive studies during the central years of the author's life, but they are also the main part of his work. In this work, Polanyi analyzes a period decisive for the development of the twentieth century. The writings deal not only with the central problems and questions, the results of which are incorporated in his main work, The Great Transformation, published in 1944, without giving any further explicit insight, and thus provide an insight into the ideas, ideas, and reflections from which they emerged are. They are also (and above all) important time documents, significant as direct and immediate reflections on the political and economic events of the inter-war period. Polanyi analyzes with great care both the economic and political events, the global economic crisis as well as the international political situation, the attempts to create the conditions for peace and recovery, as well as the conflicts that point towards a new world war. The main topics for the Austrian economist include industrial restructuring, corporate tendencies, the rise of fascism and the transformation of the economic and political institutions in Great Britain and the USA during the New Deal period. These are supplemented by works on fundamental topics such as pricing, economic theory, sociology and the theory of socialism. All investigations are subject to a uniform, theoretically and politically fundamental question: How can - after the collapse of the liberal system of the 19th century such as the socialist hopes of the twenties - defend and expand democracy and freedom? The most important articles, essays and manuscripts, which were written in the period between 1920 and 1945, are grouped into three volumes according to their content. Volume I, entitled Economic Transformation, Counter-Movements and the Fight for Democracy, contains the analyzes on the areas of economy, global economic crisis and economic policy. The subject of Volume II is The international policy between the two world wars. Volume III, in which we have summarized the theoretical work on pricing, socialist economic analysis, Marxism, sociological theory, socialism, and democracy, is under the heading of freedom, democracy, and socialism. DEUTSCH: In den letzten Jahren wächst das Interesse an den Arbeiten, die Karl Polanyi zwischen 1920 und 1945 verfasste und die - mit wenigen Ausnahmen - bisher nur schwer oder gar nicht zugänglich sind. Die in Wien und in England geschriebenen Artikel, Aufsätze und Manuskripte sind nicht nur das Ergebnis intensiver Studien während der zentralen Jahre des Lebens des Autors, sie machen auch den Hauptteil seines Werkes aus. Polanyi analysiert in diesen Arbeiten eine für die Entwicklung des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts entscheidende Periode. Die Schriften behandeln nicht nur die zentralen Problem- und Fragestellungen, deren Resultate, ohne erneut explizit aufgegriffen zu werden, in seinem 1944 publizierten Hauptwerk, The Great Transformation, einfließen, und geben damit Einblick in die Gedankengänge, Ideen und Überlegungen, aus denen jene hervorgegangen sind. Sie sind auch (und vor allen Dingen) wichtige Zeitdokumente, bedeutsam als direkte und unmittelbare Reflexionen über die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Ereignisse der Zwischenkriegsphase. Polanyi analysiert mit großer Sorgfalt sowohl die wirtschaftlichen wie auch die politischen Ereignisse, die Weltwirtschaftskrise wie die internationale politische Lage, die Versuche, die Bedingungen für Frieden und Aufschwung herzustellen, wie die Konflikte, die in Richtung eines neuen Weltkriegs weisen. Zu den Themen der hauptsächlich für den Österreichischen Volkswirt verfassten Artikel gehören die industrielle Restrukturierung, die korporativen Tendenzen, der Aufstieg des Faschismus sowie die Transformation der ökonomischen und politischen Institutionen in Großbritannien und in den USA während der Periode des New Deal. Diese werden ergänzt durch Arbeiten über grundsätzliche Themen wie Preisbildung, ökonomische Theorie, Soziologie und Theorie des Sozialismus. Allen Untersuchungen unterliegt eine einheitliche, theoretisch und politisch grundlegende Fragestellung: Wie können - nach dem Zusammenbruch des liberalen Systems des 19. Jahrhunderts wie der sozialistischen Hoffnungen der zwanziger Jahre - Demokratie und Freiheit verteidigt und ausgebaut werden?Die wichtigsten Artikel, Aufsätze und Manuskripte, die in der Periode zwischen 1920 und 1945 entstanden sind, werden nach inhaltlichen Schwerpunkten in drei Bände gruppiert. Band I, der die Überschrift Wirtschaftliche Transformation, Gegenbewegungen und der Kampf um die Demokratie trägt, enthält die Analysen zu den Themenbereichen Wirtschaft, Weltwirtschaftskrise und Wirtschaftspolitik. Gegenstand von Band II ist Die internationale Politik zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen. Band III, in dem wir die theoretischen Arbeiten zur den Fragen Preisbildung, sozialistische Wirtschaftsrechnung, Marxismus, soziologische Theorie, Sozialismus und Demokratie u.a. zusammengefasst haben, steht unter der Überschrift Freiheit, Demokratie und Sozialismus. InhaltMichele Cangiani und Claus ThomasbergerVorbemerkung9Marktgesellschaft und Demokratie: die Perspektive der menschlichen Freiheit. Karl Polanyis Arbeiten von 1920 bis 1945 11I.Politische Kämpfe in den zwanziger Jahren1.England und die Wahlen 462.Zur Krise der englischen Arbeiterbewegung513.Die neue Internationale564.Das Bergbauproblem in England635.Der englische Generalstreik726.Probleme des englischen Generalstreiks80II. Liberale Reformprojekte7.Liberale Wirtschaftsreformen in England908.Liberale Sozialreformer in England959.Schmalenbach und Liberalismus104III.Die Weltwirtschaftskrise10.Zur wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung Europas11011.Demokratie und Währung in England12012.MacDonald und die Wirtschaftspolitik12913.England auf der Waage13414.Kritik an Lausanne14215.Wirtschaft und Demokratie 14916.Weltinflationismus15517.Von Lausanne bis Washington16318.Brain-Trust siegt17019.Roosevelt zerschlägt die Konferenz178IV.Der Zusammenbruch der Demokratie in Deutschland und in Europa20.Gegenrevolution18621.Staatsgründung19322.Hitler und die Wirtschaft19923.Korporatives Österreich - eine funktionale Gesellschaft ?204V.Restrukturierung und Demokratie in England24.Wirtschaftsprogramm der Samuel-Liberalen21425.Ende der Slums21626.Englisches Stahlstatut21827.Technologische Arbeitslosigkeit22028.Elliot oder Empire ?22329.Probleme der Demokratie in England22630.Lohntarif-Bill in Lancashire22831.Lancashire im Fegefeuer23032.Lancashire als Menschheitsfrage23633.England überlegt24934.Labour und die Eisenindustrie25135.Gewerkschaftstagung in Weymouth25336.Labour in Southport25637.Tory-Planwirtschafter25938.Die Liberalen für Empirehandel261VI.New Deal39.Roosevelt im Verfassungskampf26440.Amerika im Schmelztiegel27141.Roosevelt im Kampf27942.T.V.A. - Ein amerikanisches Wirtschaftsexperiment28143.Arbeitsrecht in U.S.A.29044.Amerikanisches Gewerkschaftsgesetz verfassungsmäßig29145.Roosevelts strategischer Rückzug29346.Gewerkschaften in den U.S.A.295VII.Die Entwicklung in der Sowjetunion47.Zweiter Fünfjahresplan abgebremst29848.Wo hält Sowjetrußland?30849.Russischer Verfassungswandel316
Keywords: Polanyi essays

The Contested Sovereignty of the Firm - Dietrich, Michael (Review of Political Economy, 2002)
This paper suggests that the firm can be analysed as a regulated system of contested sovereignty. The economic literature on the firm is categorised in terms of four different perspectives on sovereignty identified using the twin factors of power and authority. But rather than any single perspective being identified as analytically superior, it is argued that a system of contested sovereignty should be based on all four perspectives. Following this, a Polanyi-inspired analysis of firm regulation is presented in which the regulation of the firm emerges to control the costs of free markets. However, this regulation depicts firm sovereignty as complex and contested rather than simply an optimal response to market failures.
Keywords: business enterprises; economics and literature; firm regulation; firm sovereignty; political economy

The 'new contractualism', social protection and the Yeatman thesis - Gaby Ramia (Journal of Sociology, 2002)
An important characteristic of public policy formulation over the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the English-speaking countries, has been the increasing use of contractual principles as regulatory tools. The 'new contractualism' represents the recent re-emergence and adaptation of the social contract of the 17th and 18th centuries and the classical legal contract that emerged in the 19th century. The work of Anna Yeatman provides the most cogent and influential, non-neo-liberal scholarly appraisal of the new contractualism. Yeatman argues that the current contractualist agenda is consistent with equality of opportunity, occasioning a redefinition of citizenship so as to improve on the discourse of social protection. This paper argues that any attempt to remove social protection flawed though it is from discussions of the new contractualism is artificial. The social justice implications of such a position are perilous, for policy formulation has not yet entered a phase in which social protection can be superseded in a way which does not violate the rights of the socio-economically disadvantaged.
Keywords: English-speaking countries; YEATMAN, Anna; citizenship; commodity fiction; contractualism; double movement; equality; fictitious commodities; governance; human rights; political planning; social justice; social movements; social protection; sociology

Ecosocialisation and environmental planning: a Polanyian approach - Low, Nicholas (Environment & Planning A, 2002)
Discusses a Polanyian approach to environmental planning, foregrounding the concept of ecosocialization. Global problems of urban modernity; Ecological modernization and the transformation of capitalism; Discussion on ecological Marxism and the transition to socialism; Polanyian perspective for environmental planning.
Keywords: capitalism; environmental engineering; human ecology

Towards a Theory of Values-Based Labeling - Barham, Elizabeth (Agriculture and Human Values, 2002)
An outline of a theory of values-based labeling as a social movement argues that it is motivated by the need to re-embed the agro-food economy in the larger social economy. A review of some basic premises of embeddedness theories derived from the work of Karl Polanyi reveals their connection to particular values-based labeling efforts. From this perspective, values-based labeling presents itself as primarily an ethical and moral effort to counter unsustainable trends within presently existing capitalism. These labels distinguish themselves from ordinary commercial labels by a focus on process and on quality. Evaluating the transformative potential and progressive nature of values-based labeling poses a key challenge. One avenue for gauging this potential is conventions theory. This approach can be adapted to consider the decision making processes that go on within values-based labeling groups, as well as consumer decision making based on such labels, as instances of what is termed a politics of ethical judgment. The conclusion emphasizes the need for more research in this area and suggests how it could be furthered.
Keywords: agricultural policy; agro-food economy; embeddedness; food policy; household production and intrahousehold allocation; marketing; relation of economics to social values; social economy

Transnational Pharmaceutical Corporations and Neo-Liberal Business Ethics in India - D'Mello, Bernard (Journal of Business Ethics, 2002)
The author critiques the expedient application of market valuation principles by the transnational corporations and other large firms in the Indian pharmaceutical industry on a number of issues like patents, pricing, irrational drugs, clinical trials, etc. He contends that ethics in business is chiseled and etched within the confines of particular social structures of accumulation. An ascendant neo-liberal social structure of accumulation has basically shaped these firms' sharp opposition to the Indian Patents Act, 1970, government administered pricing, etc. The author contends that the practice of neo-liberal economics is strongly associated with a "one dimensional" ethics that privileges market valuation principles over all others. This seems to inevitably generate a social counter-movement that struggles for social protections. He critiques neo-liberal business practices from a perspective that derives from the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi. Before the present phase of liberalization in India, markets were "managed", but without a "welfare state" in place. Moving toward deregulation of the markets without a welfare state in place is unethical. Keeping the debilities of the institutional framework of public policy in mind, the author adopts a Polanyian perspective that places its trust and hope in the growing social legitimacy of the counter-movement in opposition to both neo-liberal business practices and the degenerate behavior of state agencies.
Keywords: India; business ethics; intellectual property; international business enterprises; pharmaceutical industry; socialism

Le bénévolat dans une approche substantive de l'économie, Abstract - Gardin, Laurent (Revue française des affaires sociales, 2002)
RésuméDifférents travaux ont délivré des méthodologies et des données quantifiant l’apport du bénévolat en temps et en argent. Ces préoccupations amènent, dans le sillage des travaux de Karl Polanyi, à appréhender l’économie de manière substantive comme la dépendance de l’homme par rapport à la nature et à ses semblables. Une telle analyse montre qu’il n’y a pas nécessairement une concurrence entre ces différents registres économiques mais qu’une hybridation des ressources peut se mettre en place au service des projets associatifs. Si le bénévolat permet aux pouvoirs publics de faire des économies pour le développement de ces services, il permet aussi de développer des services plus en adéquation avec les demandes sociales, et conduit à une évolution des politiques publiques et à un déploiement de leurs actions pouvant conduire, paradoxalement, à une croissance des dépenses publiques. À partir d’exemples étudiés dans le champ de l’aide aux personnes âgées et handicapées, cette contribution vise à donner les éléments permettant la valorisation du bénévolat, à dresser une typologie des fonctions remplies par le bénévolat et à mesurer son influence sur les différents registres économiques et notamment la redistribution., Various studies have provided methodologies and data for quantifying the contribution of voluntary service in both time and money terms. This work causes one, in the wake of the work by Karl Polanyi, to apprehend the economy in substantive terms – along with the dependence of man compared to nature and his fellow creatures. Such an analysis shows that there is not necessarily a competition between these various economical registers, but that a “hybridization” of resources can be set up in the service of associative projects. If voluntary service makes it possible for the public authorities to make savings when developing such services, it also makes it possible to develop services more in line with social needs, which leads to changes in public policies and to a deployment of their actions, which can lead, paradoxically, to increased public expenditure. This article thus aims to understand the influence of voluntary service on the various economical registers, and in particular on redistribution from examples studied in the field of the assistance to the old and handicapped people, this contribution aims giving the elements allowing the valorization of the voluntary help, drawing up a typology of functions filled by the voluntary help and at measuring its influence on the various economic registers and in particular the redistribution.
Keywords: substantiveness; voluntary service

Proximité spatiale et relations science - industrie : savoirs tacites ou encastrement (Polanyi ou Polanyi) ?, Spatial proximity and relations between academic research and firms : tacit knowledge or embeddedness (Polanyi or Polanyi) ? - Grossetti, Michel; Bès, Marie-Pierre (Revue d’Économie Régionale & Urbaine, 2002)
RésuméLes notions d’encastrement et de savoirs tacites sont souvent utilisées dans des théories expliquant les effets de proximité spatiale dans les relations entre la recherche académique et les entreprises. Même si elles ont des origines proches (ne serait-ce que parce qu’elles ont été formulées à l’origine par deux frères, Karl et Michael POLANYI), elles ont des implications très différentes en ce qui concerne l’interprétation des effets de proximité. Dans un cas (l’encastrement), on peut généraliser l’explication aux effets de proximité dans les relations entre organisations alors que dans l’autre cas (savoirs tacites), l’explication se restreint aux échanges en matière de connaissance. L’analyse d’un corpus de cas de collaboration entre les laboratoires du CNRS et les entreprises plaide en faveur de la thèse de l’encastrement., ENG: The notions of embeddedness and tacit knowledge are often used in the theories explaining spatial proximity effects in the relations between academic research and firms. Even if the two notions have a close origin (they have been defined by two brothers, Karl and Michael POLANYI), they imply different views on spatial proximity effects. In one case (embeddedness), it is possible to generalize the explanation of spatial proximity effects to all kinds of relations between organizations. In the other case (tacit knowledge), only knowledge spillovers can be explained. The analysis of a set of cooperations between firms and french academic laboratories suggests that embeddedness thesis is better.Classification JEL : O18.
Keywords: POLANYI, Michael, 1891-1976; embeddedness; encastrement; proximité; savoirs tacites; science-industrie; tacit knowledge

The World Bank or Polanyi: Markets, Poverty and Social Well-being in Latin America - Kirby, Peadar (New Political Economy, 2002)
Explores the role of markets in achieving social well-being in Latin America, highlighting alternatives theories for this relationship based on the work of Karl Polanyi. Role of markets in reducing poverty; Relation between markets and social institutions; Ways in which market liberalization is damaging the livelihoods of the poor.
Keywords: Latin America; markets; poverty; social institutions

Globalization and Democracy: A New 'Great Transformation'? - Munck, Ronaldo (Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science, 2002)
Examines the relationship between democracy and development to set the scene for the pressing contemporary issue of how globalization might affect democracy and vice versa. Reference to the work of Karl Polanyi who posited a dual movement of market expansion matched by increasing social control over it; Impact of globalization.
Keywords: POLANYI, Karl, 1886-1964; democracy; double movement; economic development; globalization

The Construction of Market Institutions in Russia: A View from the Institutionalism of Polanyi - Sánchez-Andrés, Antonio; March-Poquet, José M. (Journal of Economic Issues, 2002)
This article presents information on the construction of market institutions in Russia and includes the institutional conception provided by analyst Karl Polanyi. Polanyi's main ideas will be expounded in regard to his interest in analyzing the transition. These ideas will be adapted to the object of study and then specified so that they will be efficient criteria for analyzing the present economic transition. Second, the results obtained will be applied to the Russian case, and an attempt will be made to draw some conclusions about whether Russia is moving toward a market economy. Although several distinct parts of the work of Polanyi may be of great interest in analyzing the transition process that is occurring in countries that until the 1990s were organized by central planning.. This paper discusses only the aspects which are most closely related to the construction of market economies will be mentioned. According to Polanyi, the commercialization of productive factors and money are among the determining elements for the construction of an economic market.
Keywords: Russia (federation); analysts; central planning; economic reform; industrialization; markets; transition economies

The Great Depression and the Decline of Liberal Capitalism: Polanyi and Schumpeter - Trigilia, Carlo (Economic Sociology, 2002)
This chapter contains section titled: * Market Domination and Society's Self-Defense * The Decline of the Bourgeoisie and Anti-Capitalist Policies * Analytical Convergence and Political Divergence
Keywords: SCHUMPETER, Joseph Alois, 1883-1950; capitalism; depression; economic level; economic sociology; international relations; social conditions

All you can eat: greed, lust, and the new capitalism - McQuaig, Linda (Penguin, 2001)
Explains the mired history of social and economic thinking that has culminated in the new capitalism. McQuaig argues that instead of shaping our society to fit the economy, we must shape the economy to fit the society we want. 2001.
Keywords: business & economics; capitalism; capitalism - history; economic history; free enterprise; political science

Reply to Professor Levine on Rhetoric and Reality in American Welfare History - Kern, William S. (Journal of Economic Issues (Association for Evolutionary Economics), 2001)
The article replies to professor David Levine's rhetoric and reality in American welfare history. The author largely agrees with Professor Levine's conclusion that the impact of the application of the principles of 1834 on contemporary welfare reform is "far more potent rhetorically than it is in fact" (733) and that "the slowly expanding mild welfare state is here to stay" (741). Levine argues that this is the result of the emergence and persistence of a "New Deal consensus" regarding the responsibility of government to secure macroeconomic stability and individual security that survives from its origin in the 1930s till today. The questions that arise are why this consensus emerged when it did and why it persists. In his paper the author attempts to explain why the reemergence of the rhetoric and practice of welfare reform had occurred, and he argues that an answer could be found in ideas developed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944). It had been argued that the logic of the self-regulating market required the denial of a right to life outside the market. This was affirmed in the passage of the New Poor Law and in the rhetoric and practices of current welfare reform. However, Polanyi's Great Transformation also provided us with an explanation of the factors which underlie the emergence of the New Deal consensus in the 1930s, the persistence of the welfare state, and the largely rhetorical impact of the principles of 1834 on current welfare reforms.
Keywords: United States; economic conditions - United States; economic history; macroeconomics; public welfare; reforms; welfare economics

Chapter 6: Our time - Heiskala, Risto (Will Europe Work?, 2001)
The article focuses on Europe in the age of global networks and flowing identities. In the article the author discusses the articulation of Europe. He starts with a discussion on the identity of Europe, goes on with a discussion of globalization and closes with an attempt to tie these two themes together. He then raises, in a new context, sociologist Karl Polanyi's question: "What Kind of a Time Is Our Time?" Throughout the article, specific emphasis is put on the European Union, as this network state currently uniting fifteen and in the nearest future possibly twice as many European states as today is often what is referred to combined with the term "Europe", even if it would be a mistake to believe that these two are identical. The article also throws light on the affect of Islam on the countries of Europe. In several European countries there are enclaves of millions of Muslim migrant workers and there are Muslim countries at the borders of Europe in North Africa and the Middle East.
Keywords: Europe; Islam; globalization; identity (philosophical concept); immigrants

A Karl Polanyi Revival - Mendell, Marjorie (Canadian Dimension, 2001)
Presents insights from the book 'The Great Transformation,' by Karl Polanyi. Concerns that the economic benefits of globalization override political and social costs; Polanyi's vision of democratic socialism not coordinated by central planners; Research into the origins of economic institutions.
Keywords: Great Transformation, The (Book); economics - research

Planning and the Politics of Markets: Some Lessons from Financial Regulation in Nepal - Rankin, Katharine N. (International Planning Studies, 2001)
This paper calls for an explicit return to questions about the normative foundations of planning theory and practice. It argues that a simultaneous reading of Karl Polanyi with Friedrich von Hayek can contribute to developing an ethical basis for tempering market rationality with social rationality in the current global economic conjuncture. Empirically, the paper investigates recent initiatives in Nepal to provide social protections (à la Polanyi) through financial market rules. In the face of threats to the progressive legacy in planning practice posed by the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy, Nepal's targeted lending policies and microcredit programmes offer some optimism about the potential to embed welfare provisions within market regulation, especially when compared to developments in other countries. At the same time, however, the perspectives of rural women explored here through critical ethnography raise key questions about the capacity of these regulations to generate social opportunity and highlight a role for locally situated social criticism in progressive planning practice.
Keywords: HAYEK, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992; Nepal; financial regulation; international planning studies; markets; planning; social protection

Discourses on peace and development - Hettne, B. (Progress in Development Studies, 2001)
Assuming a close relationship between peace and development, this paper analyses a succession of schools of thought in development forming part of three distinct, historically contextualized development and security discourses: the industrialization imperative in the emerging state-system in nineteenth-century Europe, the international concern with global poverty in the bipolar post second world war world and the current meaning of development in a globalized and increasingly chaotic world. The third of these discourses contains major challenges for development theory. The discourses are related to great transformations in political economy, understood in Polanyian terms as tensions between market expansion and societal response.
Keywords: conflict; development theory; discourse; economic development; market expansion; peace; peace - economic aspects; security

Constructing a European Market: Standards, Regulation, and Governance - Egan, Michelle P. (Oxford University Press, 2001)
'An excellent contribution to our understanding of the political construction of markets... This is a well-written book, enjoyable to read as well as being very informative. I view this volume as a 'must read' for all scholars and graduate students in the areas of government and business, the politics of market economies and comparative politics in general. Michelle Egan's description and explanation of market construction and its impact on business standards, regulation and governance will be valuable to all of us for many, many years to come.' -Henry Jacek, McMaster University; Polibus: Newsletter of the IPSA Research CommitteeThis book provides a detailed analysis of the policies and institutions used by the EU to create a single market. Through a historical overview, sectoral case studies, and an assessment of recent policy initiatives, the author provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of European economic integration.
Keywords: European Court of Justice; European Union; United States; business & economics; economic policy; harmonization; market integration; mutual recognition; public policy; regulation; single market; standards; trade barriers

Karl Polanyi and the creation of the "market society" - Gootenberg, Paul (The other mirror : grand theory through the lens of Latin America (Edited by Centeno, Miguel Angel, López-Alves, Fernando)., 2001)
Keywords: Latin America; economic history; philosophy; politics and government; social sceinces

Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation and the Current Transformations in Central Europe - Hake, Eric R.; Neale, Walter C. (Economic transition in historical perspective: Lessons from the history of economics, 2001)
Keywords: agriculture; collectives; communes; comparison of public and private enterprises and nonprofit institutions; contracting out; economic thought; history of economic thought: individuals; illegal behavior; legal institutions; nonprofit institutions; privatization; public enterprises; socialist systems and transitional economies: legal institutions; transitional economies

Institutional Investors and Polanyi's Double Movement: A Model of Contemporary Currency Crises - Harmes, Adam (Review of International Political Economy, 2001)
This article constructs a model of contemporary currency crises which incorporates the role played by institutional investors and the dynamics associated with Karl Polanyi's notion of the "double movement." Polanyi's double movement, and its recognition of the need to integrate politics with economics, is used to explain why so many governments are prone to pursue policies that lead to a speculative attack against fixed exchange rates and why virtually every modern fixed exchange rate regime has ended in crisis. Evidence on the short-term and herd behaviour of institutional investors is used to explain why contemporary currency crises do not appear to be justified by underlying economic fundamentals and why these crises do so much more damage than their earlier counterparts. The model is then applied to the 1992 European Exchange Rate Mechanism crisis, the 1994 Mexican peso crisis and the 1997 East Asian crisis. While recognizing that variations exist in the specific circumstances of each episode, the argument of this article is that the progression of events do seem to conform to the model presented.
Keywords: corporate finance and governance; double movement; economic development; financial instruments; financial markets; foreign exchange; institutional investors; international linkages to development; international monetary arrangements and institutions; international political economy; non-bank financial institutions; pension funds; role of international organizations; saving and capital investment

Contesting the "Great transformation" : local struggles with the market in South India - Herring, Ronald (Agrarian studies : synthetic work at the cutting edge, ed. by James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt, 2001)
Keywords: India; agrarian studies

Regulationist and Autopoieticist Reflections on Polanyi's Account of Market Economies and the Market Society - Jessop, Bob (New Political Economy, 2001)
This article re-interprets and develops Polanyi’s substantive institutionalist analysis of capitalist market economies and the market society in the light of two more recent approaches to the same issues. These are the Parisian ‘regulation school’ on contemporary capitalism and systems-theoretica l accounts of the modern economy. All three regard the capitalist economy (or, for autopoietic systems theory, the market economy) as an operationally autonomous system that is nonetheless socially embedded and needful of complex forms of social regulation. For each, an adequate account of economic activities should explore how they are related to the wider social environment; how they are embedded in a wider nexus of social institutions; how the latter assist in reproducing the capitalist (or market) economy; and how their development is coupled to that of these and other environing institutions. There are also some important differ- ences among these approaches, however, which enable an exploration of their respective limitations and also provide useful bases for further theoretical and empirical research. Thus, after presenting these three perspectives on the institutedness and embeddedness of economies. I consider some basic problems in analysing the improbable stability and reproducibility of the capitalist economy, paying particular attention to governance and meta-governance.
Keywords: capitalism; economics; market society; political economy; regulation school; substantive approach

Une lecture de Karl Polanyi - Maucourant, Jérôme (L'Économie politique, 2001)
Vouloir débattre de questions d’économie politique, comme la présente revue et toute l’oeuvre de Karl Polanyi (1) nous y invitent, semble relever, à l’aube du XXIe siècle, d’une absolue gageure. Sur le plan académique, l’économie politique s’est métamorphosée en une « science » économique fondée sous le double sceau de l’individualisme méthodologique et de l’affirmation d’une dichotomie totale entre faits et valeurs. A l’inverse, l’anthropologie de Polanyi se fonde sur un socialisme humaniste qui fut nourri par des lectures de Karl Marx et un ancien projet de « sociologie chrétienne ». Sur le plan théorique et politique, Karl Polanyi cherche à justifier une conception de la démocratie comme contrôle social de notre devenir. Dès 1922, chose qui est peu soulignée, il tente de penser un modèle de socialisme décentralisé pour répondre à ce qu’il considère comme l’impasse du libéralisme et l’erreur que constitue la planification centralisée.

Groundwork for an Institutional Economic Approach to 'Transition': Smith and Polanyi Reconsidered - Ozveren, Eyup (Economic transition in historical perspective: Lessons from the history of economics, 2001)
Keywords: Marxist; SMITH, Adam, 1723-1790; current heterodox approaches: institutional; evolutionary; history of economic thought; history of economic thought through 1925: socialist; history of economic thought: classical; history of economic thought: individuals; socialist systems and transitional economies: performance and prospects P27

What Karl Polanyi Found in Dahomey - Sandall, Roger (The culture cult : designer tribalism and other essays, 2001)
A study of the social effects of romantic primitivism.
Keywords: alternative lifestyles; culture; meningen; modern civilization - public opinion; primitive societies - public opinion; primitivism

Le travail, la servitude et la vie. Avant Marx et Polanyi, Eugène - Vatin, François (Revue du MAUSS, 2001)
Keywords: France; MARX, Karl, 1818-1883; history; labour

Religion and the Market: Opposition, Absorption, or Ambiguity? - Haddorff, David W. (Review of Social Economy, 2000)
This article addressed the complex relationship between religion and the market by proposing three basic paradigms, and then applying them to contemporary Christian social thought (or social ethics). The first conflicting model, following Max Weber and Karl Marx, views religion and the market in opposition, which results in greater secularisation. The second, following Emile Durkheim, proposes a 'functionalist' model of society, in which the market itself becomes sacred. The third, following Karl Polanyi, claims the two are more dialectical, in that both are affected by the power of the other; they remain in an ambiguous relationship. The author argues that the third model is the most coherent description of this complex relationship as well as the one most consistent with the convictions of Chrstian social thought.
Keywords: church & state; dialectical; double movement; dystopian; economics; functionalism; hom. economics; homo economicus; religious aspects; secularisation; secularization; social ethics

Rural Community Life and the Importance of Reciprocal Survival Strategies - Meert, Henk (Sociologia Ruralis, 2000)
Although Belgian poverty is mainly concentrated in urban regions, the profound restructuring of labour and food markets, the dismantling of the welfare state and the growth of new types of households are also producing poverty and social exclusion in rural areas. This paper stresses that not every deprived rural household should be regarded as excluded from society. By developing survival strategies, households attempt to escape from social marginalization. To understand these responses, a typology of survival strategies is constructed, based on Polanyi’s spheres of economic integration (market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity). These survival strategies, including agricultural and non-agricultural activities, are analysed in relation to the Hageland,a peripheral rural area in Flanders. Based upon Doreen Massey’s geological metaphor, the current potentials and obstacles embedded in the historical layers of the socio-spatial structure of the area, are assessed. By comparing the results of this research with similar research amongst urban households, some particularities of rural poverty are distinguished.
Keywords: Belgium; economic integration; poverty; urban poverty

Interpreting the Consequences of Midwestern Agricultural Industrialization - King, Martin Burce (Journal of Economic Issues (Association for Evolutionary Economics), 2000)
The article focuses on the interpretation of consequences of Midwestern agricultural industrialization. The nature and consequences of the industrialization of agriculture are well documented in academic research and in the popular press. Interpretations of the process vary in reflection of the diverse perceptions of the nature and overall significance of industrialization. Suggested policies range from a "hands-off" to a "prohibit and prevent wherever possible" approach. Both approaches are unrealistic because they fail to recognize the historical context in which agricultural industrialization is taking place. In this paper, the author presents a historical context for the process, using nineteenth-century Illinois and the industrialization of swine production as examples of commercialization and industrialization of Midwestern agriculture, respectively. The author integrates the work of Karl Polanyi and K. William Kapp into the discussion to provide a foundation for realistic policy and to demonstrate the relevance of an institutionalist perspective to the formation of contemporary agricultural policy.
Keywords: KAPP, Karl William; agriculture; commercialization; crop insurance; economic theory; evolutionary economics; industrialization; production (economic theory); rural industries

A Tale of Three Karls: Marx, Popper, Polanyi and Post-Socialist Europe - Marquand, David (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 2000)
Focuses on the social and political changes brought about by capitalism in Europe. Advocacy of socialist Karl Marx, Karl Popper and Karl Polanyi for social democracy; Discussion on the relationship between society and economy; Notion of futurism regarding the inevitability of change.
Keywords: Europe; European politics & government; capitalism; change; socialism

The Second Great Transformation: The Politics of Globalisation in the Global North - Zincone, Giovanna; Agnew, John (Space & Polity, 2000)
Dominant strands of thinking in contemporary social science consider economic globalisation, the increasing role of cross-border flows and transactions in economic organisation, in terms of some combination of either limited or considerable economic impact and either positive or negative consequences for the general welfare. Little attention has been given thus far to its political consequences within those parts of the world, the developed countries of the Global North, where its impact should be greatest. This paper argues that economic globalisation is in fact the geographical face of a new great transformation in the forces of production (reductions in transport and communication costs, dramatically increased capital and labour mobility, delocalisation of technological innovation, etc.) on a par in its potential impact with the transition to market society with fragmented states first identified by Karl Polanyi. Globalisation, it is claimed here, is the product of action by states as much as markets and, in the short-term, seems to accentuate social inequalities within states, to weaken the rights of current citizens, to lessen the weight of the democratic vote and to stimulate a profound restructuring of both work and the welfare state in the developed world or ‘Global North'. But more significantly, in the long term, when focus on globalisation shifts from its recent economic causes and short-term political impact to its more long term political consequences, recent trends towards a more global economy can be seen in a different light: as entailing a potential positive transformation in the geographical organisation of political rights and citizenship on a par with the first great transformation in economic life and citizenship signalled by the coming of market society.
Keywords: globalization; international economic relations; market society; political science; production (economic theory)

Sustainable Agriculture in the United States and France: A Polanyian Perspective - Barham, Mary Elizabeth (2000)
Keywords: France; social movements; sustainable agriculture

Three Pillars of Welfare State Theory: T.H. Marshall, Karl Polanyi and Alva Myrdal in Defence of the National Welfare State - Holmwood, John (European Journal of Social Theory, 2000)
Current social and political theory is sceptical of the future of welfare states in the face of global markets. Their moral claims, too, have been challenged by the neo-liberal association of market capitalism and individual freedom and by an implicit acceptance of that critique - of the welfare state as bureaucratic - by left-wing commentators. This article offers a defence of the national welfare state as the guarantor of 'complex freedom'. This defence is derived from the theoretical contributions of Marshall, Polanyi and Myrdal and offers a reconsideration of the debate immediately after the second world war over the welfare state and its relevance today. Marshall's concept of social rights has become a familiar part of our own debate, but it is argued that Polanyi provides the rigorous critique of market relationships which is missing, and Myrdal locates gender issues as central to the understanding of welfare state development and women's rights as integral to social rights.
Keywords: economic policy; gender; globalization; government policy; human rights; markets; public welfare; social & economic rights; social rights; welfare; welfare economics

The Great Transformation - Brand, Horst (Dissent (00123846), 2000)
The article reviews the book "The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time," by Karl Polanyi.
Keywords: Great Transformation, The (Book); book review; economics; nonfiction

Conceptualizing Resistance to Globalization - Chin, Christine B. N.; Mittelman, James H. (Globalization and the Politics of Resistance, 2000)
Assessments of resistance to globalization are necessarily influenced by the manner in which one conceptualizes these processes. Too often, both of the terms (‘resistance’ and ‘globalization’) are used promiscuously, the latter as a buzzword or catchall and the former in many different ways, sometimes as a synonym for challenges, protests, intransigence, or even evasions. Hence, we seek to juxtapose alternative explanations of resistance and highlight the complexities of conceptualizing it. The purpose of this chapter, then, is to explore the question, what is the meaning of resistance in the context of globalization?
Keywords: Islamist movement; NAFTA; globalization; international political economy; organic intellectual; resistance; symbolic resource; transnational capital

The Reproving of Karl Polanyi - Hejeebu, Santhi; McCloskey, Deirdre (Critical Review, 2000)
Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation has had enormous influence since its publication in 1944. In form, this influence has been salutary: Polanyi targets one of the main weaknesses of modern economics. But in substance, Polanyi's influence has been baneful. Mirroring the methodological blindness he criticizes, Polanyi insists on the all-or-nothing existence/nonexistence of laissez faire--and on its all-or-nothing goodness/badness.
Keywords: critique; history of economic thought: individuals

Market Dominance, Crime, and Globalisation - Messner, Steven F.; Rosenfeld, Richard (Social Dynamics of Crime and Control: New Theories for a World in Transition, 2000)
KM: Our point of departure is Karl Polanyi's classic work on the emergence of industrial capitalism and recent studies that further develop Polanyi's insights. We draw on these analyses to pose a fundamental issue confronting all capitalist societies: the need to restrain the market and prevent the economy from dominating other institutional realms. We explain how this general institutional challenge bear specifically on the problem of crime and crime control
Keywords: crime; double movement; globalization; institutional-anomie theory; law

Naukratis: Trade in Archaic Greece - Möller, Astrid (Oxford University Press, 2000)
Archaic Naukratis was a busy trading place in the Western Delta of the Nile, renowned for its sanctuaries and courtesans, granting the Greeks access to Egyptian grain and luxury items. Now, more than one hundred years after the discovery and excavation of Naukratis, the author offers the first full-length analysis of the archaeology and archaic history of this important site. Although Naukratis always features in modern accounts of ancient Greek colonization, it was not a place where the Greeks could freely establish their own political and social organization--it was under the strict control of the Egyptian pharaoh and his officials. To understand the special status of Naukratis, the author takes the port of trade model, surveying the political, social, and economic background of both Late Period Egypt and archaic Greece. A major section of the book comprises an archaeological re-evaluation of the topography of archaic Naukratis and its material finds. The sanctuaries, archaic pottery styles, terracottas, faiences, statuettes, and other small finds are examined in the light of recent scholarship, and an in-depth study of the literary evidence is brought to bear on the archaeological material. This book comprises a significant contribution to our understanding of Graeco-Egyptian relations during the seventh and sixth centuries BC and also demonstrates that Polanyian economic theory can play an invaluable rï¿½le in the ongoing debate about the concepts best employed to analyse the ancient Greek economy.
Keywords: Ancient Egypt; business & economics; economic history; history

Freedom and the Market (An Analysis of the Anti-globalization Movement from the Perspective of the Theoretical Foundation of the Evaluation of the Dynamics of Capitalism by Polanyi, Hayek and Keynes.) - Nikitin, Pavel V.; Elliott, John E. (Forum for Social Economics, 2000)
Those who believe that the free market is positively related to both economic efficiency and individual freedom are prone to regard resistance to the establishment of the global market essentially free from any serious sociopolitical constraint as a politically insignificant expression of impatience, ignorance, and hypocrisy. This article attempts to endow the manifestation of discontent with the status quo evident in public protests in Seattle and Washington DC with political significance through explicating it as an expression of a fundamental conflict between economic efficiency and individual freedom inherent in the global implementation of the principle of self-regulating markets. This analysis of the anti-globalization movement is conducted from the perspective of the theoretical foundation of the evaluation of the dynamics of capitalism by Polanyi, Hayek, and Keynes, and its conclusions are brought to bear upon the validity of their contesting views of the relationship between economic efficiency and individual freedom.
Keywords: anti-globalization movement; capitalist systems; international economic order; political economy

Karl Polanyi's Forms of Integration as Ways of Mapping - Schaniel, William C.; Neale, Walter C. (Journal of Economic Issues, 2000)
Researcher Karl Polanyi's "forms of integration"--redistribution, reciprocity, and exchange--have been much used to describe and explain various economies. Such mapping presents information about the sources and destinations of the flows of material means in each society in ways that are easily correlated with the variables that most thoroughly and simply account for the flows of material means in different societies. Mapping may be looked upon as the selection of a "projection" for portraying the flows of material means. The diagrams below illustrate the discussions of each form of integration and are examples of mapping. As is the case for projections selected for geographical mapping, for each way of mapping a form of integration the criterion of the appropriateness of the choice of projection is analogous to a mathematical function. The independent variables would be information about the social system; the dependent variable would be the directions in which the material means flow. The merits of the choice of projection are simplicity and the accuracy with which the directions of flow are portrayed.
Keywords: commercial policy; economics; forms of integration; functions; mappings (mathematics); mathematics; social sciences

Competing economic ideologies in South Africa's economic debate - Lazar, David (British Journal of Sociology, 1996)
This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support.
Keywords: South Africa; South Africa - economic conditions; economic policy; social action; social classes; socioeconomics

Working Paper No. 63, On Karl Polanyi and His Conception of Fascism - Mistkawi, Serene (Working Papers in Economics, 2022)
This inquiry seeks to establish that the writings of author Karl Polanyi offered insights into key variables and historical conditions that gave rise to the system we know of as “fascism.” Integral to his insights, Polanyi describes economic conditions attendant for fascism to emerge, with one condition noted as widespread and persistent unemployment. Polanyi stresses that fascism needs to be understood as reactionary, a responding to features integral to classical liberalism. Considering a broad historical context Polanyi teaches us of the political conditions necessary for fascism to emerge and take form as political movements wielding power. He considers conflicts in aims between economic and political institutions. In addition, Polanyi analyzes some implications of a changing market, as well as some effects that a changing market might have over individual freedoms, as well as some of the complexities that can be associated with regulation.
Keywords: classical liberalism; currency; fascism; interventionism; regulation

The Rise of the Capital-State and Neo-Nationalism: A New Polanyian Moment - Svitych, Oleksandr (Brill, 2022)
Keywords: critical social sciences; global studies; neo-nationalism; populism; social sciences; sociology & anthropology

Karl Polanyi and the Rise of Fascism - England, Christopher M. (New Political Science, 2022)
This article reconstructs Karl Polanyi’s account of fascism’s rise in his 1935 article, “The Essence of Fascism.” Following the elevation of Hitler to power in 1933, Polanyi embarked on a reassessment of Nietzsche, Othmar Spann, Spengler, Evola, and other figures of the interwar conservative revolution. He argues that the fascist quest for national unity emerges when 19th century liberalism fails to address the growing atomization and economic dislocation of modern society. On the one hand, fascism valorizes the mythopoetic, prehistorical vitalism that liberal rationalism and social democracy sought to purge from public life. On the other, fascism aspires to a higher form of elitist, technological mastery than egalitarian states can achieve. These tensions, he predicts, will result in the radicalization and collapse of fascist regimes in a European war. This article illuminates Polanyi’s deep understanding of political modernity and the contemporary implications of his philosophical critique of the far right.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi; conservative revolution; fascism; modernity; radical right

Karl Polanyi’s ‘socialist accounting’ and ‘overview’ in the age of data analytics - Rief, Silvia (New Political Economy, 2022)
Digital capitalism’s information infrastructure is the subject of contentious debates concerning its transformative effects on the political economy and society. A frequent proposition, referring to older arguments of the ‘socialist calculation debate’, is that with big data analytics the pro-market arguments of neoliberal economists such as Hayek or Mises become obsolete. This article critically examines this proposition by drawing on Karl Polanyi’s notion of overview; a core theme in his outlines of a socialist economy and accounting written in the 1920s. In these contributions to the early Austrian socialist calculation debate, Polanyi discusses how to gain knowledge of the economic and social processes in such a way that the economy can be democratically governed according to its socialist aims and purposes. This article highlights the relevance of Polanyi’s work on socialist accounting, along with his later perspectives on technology and on social scientific method, for reflecting upon data- and algorithm-driven economic governance. Polanyi’s critical analysis of abstraction effected through methods of knowing suggests a sceptical stance vis-à-vis current versions of technological ‘solutionism’, which places its faith in data and algorithms as tools for economic and social, or socialist, planning.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi; accounting; data analytics; digital socialism; economic theory; overview; socialist accounting; socialist calculation

Polanyi’nin Perspektifinden Sosyal Politikayı Okumak: Piyasa, Refah ve Emek Sorunsalı - Şenkal, Abdulkadir (Journal of Social Policy Conferences, 2022)
The Great Transformation, published in 1944 by Karl Polanyi, brought a new dimension to the relationship between market, state, and welfare. Polanyi considered the relation between markets and societies as a central feature of any social order; according to him, while the market destabilizes society, the commodification of labor, land, and money creates a reaction or “counter-movement.” For this reason, he describes market society as being a dominant principle for social organization. Social relations are embedded within the economic system instead of the economy being embedded in social relations. Polanyi also claims that market society is a political and social construct rather than a natural phenomenon. Yet, the rapid growth of government bureaucracy and interference in the private sphere has challenged many traditional notions related to the nature of capitalist society, especially since the 1940s. Therefore, the state plays an important role in both the establishment and regulation of the private market economy. This article proposes an interpretation, in the context of the contemporary welfare state based on Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which discusses the distinction between market, welfare, and labor. The institutions, that once contributed to embedding the market economy within society, now play an important role in situations that have potential consequences for those seeking help from the welfare state.
Keywords: double movement; emek; labour; refah; social policy; sosyal politika; welfare; Çifte Hareket

Polanyi and the Peasant Question in China: State, Peasant, and Land Relations in China, 1949–Present - Chuang, Julia; Yasuda, John (Politics & Society, 2022)
This article applies Karl Polanyi’s concept of a double movement to the trajectory of rural state policies in China since 1949. It argues that Chinese socialism created a contradictory social contract that has fueled an ongoing struggle between state and peasantry over the surplus generated from rural land. This struggle has shaped a historical oscillation between state policies that facilitate extraction of agricultural surpluses and policies that introduce social protections in the form of household farming and revitalized collective ownership. Based on secondary sources, this article compares the arc of rural policies during the Mao era and in the transition to and during the current state capitalist period. Then, based on original interview-based and ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in rural Sichuan Province, it analyzes the current introduction of urban and agrarian capital into the rural economy, revealing dynamics of a current countermovement from state-led extraction to compromise.
Keywords: China; Polanyi; agrarian transition; land politics; peasant politics; state capitalism; urbanization

Planning laissez-faire: Supranational central banking and structural reforms - Braun, Benjamin; Carlo, Donato Di; Diessner, Sebastian (Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 2022)
The mandate of the European Central Bank (ECB) does not extend to labor market and social policies at the national level. Why, despite the reputational costs, did the ECB act as a staunch advocate of structural labor market reforms from 1999 through 2015? We discuss this question through the theoretical lens of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Although Polanyi has been a key reference point for the debate on the social consequences of European economic and monetary integration, one of his key insights has received surprisingly little attention—that central banks have the power to mitigate the impact of international economic integration on domestic social protection. Polanyi regarded central banks—much like trade unions—as national-level institutions of non-market coordination, acting as a protective buffer against the functional pressures of the fixed-exchange-rate monetary regime that was the international gold standard. By contrast, the ECB, as a supranational central bank, embodies these functional pressures. This helps explain why, rather than protecting existing social structures against the logic of the fixed-exchange-rate monetary regime, the ECB has sought to protect the monetary regime by going out of its way to re-shape labor market institutions at the national level.
Keywords: European Central Bank; Europäische Zentralbank; Karl Polanyi; monetary integration; social protection; sozialpolitik; structural reforms; strukturreformen; wirtschafts- und währungsunion

Polanyi and social economy - Isaac, Barry L. (A Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 2022)
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. Substantivism was championed in economic anthropology by economist-turned-anthropologist George Dalton and became the reigning paradigm in the subfield during the 1960s. Formalism arose in opposition, arguing that capitalist and pre-capitalist economies differ in degree, not in kind, and thus can all be analysed using the tools of microeconomics. Formalism largely displaced substantivism during the 1970s and 1980s as anthropologists increasingly focused on the economic integration of the world's peasant sectors into their national and regional economies.

The Political Economy of Revolution: Karl Polanyi in Tahrir Square - Zayed, Hany (Theory, Culture & Society, 2022)
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 Polanyi’s theoretical apparatus, this article contends that there is a broad alignment between the first movement and the Egyptian neoliberal experience, a partial alignment between the second movement and the Egyptian Revolution, and a multilayered entanglement that implicates and encircles both movements. Not only does this research demonstrate that contemporary Egyptian history can find new currency in and be further illuminated by Polanyi’s political economy, it also critiques, complicates, reconceptualizes and extends Polanyi’s theoretical framework. In so doing, it redresses the underfocus of Polanyian political economy on the theory of revolution in general and the Egyptian Revolution in particular, problematizes extant accounts on neoliberalism and the double movement, and extends analyses between neoliberalism and revolution in political economy literatures. By clarifying our understanding of contemporary social change, this essay underscores how Polanyi’s work remains a pertinent, viable and valuable prism to examine momentous social transformations.
Keywords: Egypt; Karl Polanyi; double movement; neoliberalism; revolution

Karl Polanyi and the Paradoxes of the Double Movement - Vail, John (Routledge, 2022)
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 forensic examination and critique of Polanyi’s argument. It develops an interpretive framework of the double movement as four interrelated social processes: the establishment of the self-regulating market, the rise of a market society that deepens and extends market imperatives, a social protection phase that constrains the market and safeguards society, and the contradictions and crises that result from this clash of social principles. The book will be an indispensable guide for students and scholars across the social sciences which illuminates the relevance of Polanyi’s insights to a critical understanding of the contemporary era –the scourge of insecurity and inequality, the multiple crises of neoliberalism, the rise of right wing populism- as well as those interested in egalitarian and emancipatory alternatives to capitalism.
Keywords: double movement; market society

Creativity, Pluralism, and Fictitious Narratives: Understanding IP Law Through Karl Polanyi - Suthersanen, Uma (2022)
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 sorts of res emanating from creative and entrepreneurial labour as well as from capital investment. Continued attempts to discuss or adjudicate IP law, policy and reform through strict conceptual silos such as creativity, labour, and investment are doomed narratives.Instead, I invite readers to appreciate that early modern rules in sensu lato were about mixed motivations of reward, investment, recognition, competition, honour, public interest, and more. The implicit suggestion in this paper is that the root cause of continuing legal conundrums today is the failure to appreciate the pattern set out by two related socio-legal mappings: (i) motivations for early rules in relation to creative and entrepreneurial labour and products in Europe; and (ii) the extent to which current IP norms and laws evolved to absorb such myriad motivations over five hundred years. I employ Karl Polanyi’s theory on the commodification of labour, including investment-backed labour, into tradeable, fictitious commodities, where law and property are recognised as vital institutional tools which disembed and re-embed society from/into the economy. Polanyi’s motivation ethos is effective in synthesising the different mapping points to create a pointilliste landscape which, in turn, shows why IP law only makes juridical sense if it is viewed as a pluralistic concept.
Keywords: creativity; intellectual property; pluralism

Devlet, Piyasa ve Toplum: Karl Polanyi ve Friedrich A. Hayek Üzerine Bir İnceleme - Güder, Mustafa; Atalay, Kürşad (İzmir İktisat Dergisi, 2022)
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 perspectives on the same phenomena. In the study, it is determined that these thinkers have a descriptive power in the ideological classification of later studies. Based on this, the views of the thinkers; It is put forward that it represents an "ideological pH value" for the social sciences. Polanyi draws attention that the ideals of individual freedom and equality claimed by the market system are not realized; brings social values to the fore.. Hayek claims that the market is the best institutional order that ensures human well-being and freedom. This study aims to discuss Hayek's free market view and Polanyi's embedded economic system with its political, economic and social aspects comparatively.
Keywords: HAYEK, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992; devlet; market; piyasa; society; state; toplum

The political trilemma of contemporary social-ecological transformation – lessons from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation - Novy, Andreas (Globalizations, 2022)
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 (globalization, nation state and democracy), however, have to be redefined to grasp contemporary dynamics of deglobalization. Based on a modified political trilemma of contemporary social-ecological transformation, I discuss and compare three visions and the resultant strategies: (1) Liberal globalism, focusing on hyperglobalization and individualism, (2) nationalistic capitalism, stressing national sovereignty and authoritarian governance, and (3) foundational economy based on planetary coexistence which combines selective economic deglobalization with a strengthening of a place-based foundational economy, and their respective social-ecological infrastructural configurations.
Keywords: Great Transformation, The (Book); Polanyi; deglobalization; foundational economy; hyperglobalization; social-ecological transformation

Polanyi, Market Fundamentalism, and the Institutional Structure of Capitalism - Burlamaqui, Leonardo (CEBRI Brazilian Center for International Relations, 2022)
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 both the Schumpeterian and the Post-Keynesian perspectives in economics. This is especially so when it comes to the discussion of "socioeconomic stability" and, more precisely, as Keynes himself stated in the General Theory: to explain why capitalist economies manifest themselves in different ways and degrees, in spite of encompassing inherent elements of instability and unpredictability.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 both the Schumpeterian and the Post-Keynesian perspectives in economics. This is especially so when it comes to the discussion of "socioeconomic stability" and, more precisely, as Keynes himself stated in the General Theory: to explain why capitalist economies manifest themselves in different ways and degrees, in spite of encompassing inherent elements of instability and unpredictability.
Keywords: Brazil; new economic sociology; political economy

Capitalism and Crisis: Thinking Through Capitalist Crisis with Schumpeter and Polanyi - Delanty, Gerard (Capitalism, Democracy, Socialism: Critical Debates, 2022)
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 undergoes another revulsion. While the two authors were very different – Polanyi a left-wing critic of capitalism; Schumpeter a politically right-wing economist who favoured capitalism – both were influenced by Marx’s analysis of capitalism and have helped to shape the debate on the crisis of capitalism. Indeed, Schumpeter was convinced Marx was mostly right in his prediction of the end of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. The chapter begins with a brief account of the Marxist theory capitalism in order to contextualise the discussion of the two theorists.
Keywords: MARX, Karl, 1818-1883; Polanyi; SCHUMPETER, Joseph Alois, 1883-1950; capitalism; crisis

Pourquoi relire Karl Polanyi au XXIe siècle ? - Morvan-Roux, Solène; Servet, Jean-Michel; Tiran, André (L'Économie politique, 2022)
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 fil du temps, influencés par la science économique dominante, les décideurs politiques ont acquis la conviction que les marchés se régulaient d’eux-mêmes pour autant que les lois et les règlements ne les en empêchent. Peu à peu, à mesure que la pensée fondée sur le libre marché s’étendait à l’ensemble de la société tout comme le règne de la machine, les humains et la nature ont été considérés comme des marchandises appelées « travail » pour ceux-ci et « terre » ou « ressources naturelles » pour celle-là. L’« économie de marché » avait transformé la société humaine en une « société de marché ». La finance et la monnaie ont joué un rôle généralement sous-estimé dans cette transformation ; un rôle que Karl Polanyi a particulièrement mis en avant et qui résonne quasi quotidiennement avec notre actualité.
Keywords: Great Transformation, The (Book); interdisciplinary research; market society

Penser les bouleversements du monde à partir de Karl Polanyi - Postel, Nicolas (Revue Française de Socio-Économie, 2022)

¿Uno de los nuestros?: otra vuelta de tuerca al marxismo de Karl Polanyi - Rodríguez, Sergio Braulio Véliz (El Buho: Revista electrónica de la Asociación Andaluza de Filosofía, 2022)
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”.
Keywords: Marxism; double movement; economi; economistic fallacy; embeddedness; embeddness; fictitious commodities; formal economy; substantive economy

Discussions around Argentine Capitalism: Economic Debate and Contribution of Karl Polanyi for Our Days - Rossi, Ignacio Andrés (2022)
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 the specialized press and the recently published bibliography, paying attention to the theoretical, interpretative and ideological proposals that allow us to generate relationships with Polanyi's theory. It was concluded that the latter's ideas about the functioning of capitalism, markets, the State and contemporary social dynamics provide significant conceptual background to frame the current discussions among social scientists about the Argentine economy.
Keywords: Argentina; capitalism; development; stability; state

The double movement in Africa: a Nkrumah-Polanyi analysis of free market fatigue in Ghana’s private sector - Langan, Mark (Review of International Political Economy, 2021)
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 historical implementation of free market reform. It builds upon the author’s engagement with 66 interviewees – business people and policy stakeholders – in relation to the condition of that country’s poultry and tomato industries. Unpacking interviewee narratives, the article points to a striking common theme, namely that business stakeholders call for the re-embedding of the economy via developmentalist strategies to move beyond neo-colonial trade systems. In this vein, the article provides an original contribution to studies of International Political Economy by demonstrating the efficacy of a Nkrumah-Polanyi ensemble for making sense of business communities’ potential role in countermovements for developmentalism in Africa.
Keywords: Ghana; Nkrumah; Polanyi; double movement; free trade; neo-colonialism; private sector

Market society and the institutional theory of Karl Polanyi - Cangiani, Michele (Institutional Economics: Perspectives and Methods in Pursuit of a Better World, 2021)
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 uneasiness, and ecological distress, Polanyian institutionalism remains a rich source of insight on humanity’s challenges and possibilities.

Institutional Economics: Perspectives and Methods in Pursuit of a Better World - Whalen, Charles J. (Routledge, 2021)
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 Polanyi, to the newer viewpoints of post-Keynesian institutionalism, feminist institutionalism, and environmental institutionalism. Methods range from frameworks used to analyze public policy and institutional change, to modes of analysis including myth busting, historically grounded narratives, and computer-based simulations. Each chapter surveys the origins, development, key features, applications, and frontiers of a particular viewpoint, framework, or mode of analysis. Due consideration is given to both strengths and weaknesses; and woven into the chapters is attention to core institutionalist concepts, including technology, institutions, culture, and complexity. The book provides economists with promising starting points for new research, students with contributions refreshingly in touch with the real world, and policymakers and social scientists with compelling reasons for engaging further with the institutionalist tradition.
Keywords: economic history; economic theory; institutional economics

Neoliberal Capitalism and Visegrád Countermovements - Hann, Chris; Scheiring, Gábor (Europe-Asia Studies, 2021)
Keywords: countermovement; populism; visegrad countries

Seeing like a Socialist: On Socialist Worldviews from Polanyi to Taylor to Now - Grant, John; Dunlop, Mallory (New Political Science, 2021)
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 Weltanschauung”). Each treats worldview thinking as indispensable and we use them as catalysts for developing a socialist vision. Finally, we bring our insights to bear on the worldview potential of socialist republicanism. We contend that a promising worldview emerges by elaborating the following components: a political anthropology of human possibilities; anti-capitalism, social freedom, and non-domination; socialist civic virtues; and the promise and limits of pluralism.
Keywords: TAYLOR, Charles; socialism

The Greater Transformation: Digitalization and the Transformative Power of Distributive Forces in Digital Capitalism - Pfeiffer, Sabine (International Critical Thought, 2021)
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 forces. Their respective focal points are different but complementary. For Polanyi, the decisive historical and theoretical break (and the cause of the destructive effects) lies in the act of purchasing human labor, whereas for Marx it lies in the act of producing value and in the relations of production as well as the relations of distribution linked to it. Working from this theoretical basis, current developments in digitalization are analyzed not as a further development within productive forces but as a transforming development of distributive forces. Following the logic of The Great Transformation, current developments should thus not be interpreted as a second great transformation but as the augmentation of the first, leading to a “greater” transformation associated with even more destructive potential. This leaves little hope for a smooth transition into any form of post-growth society.
Keywords: digital capitalism; digital transformation; distribution; political economy; productive forces

Karl Polanyi, the New Deal and the Green New Deal - Dale, Gareth (Environmental Values, 2021)
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 Deal was responding on the national scale. The paper concludes by drawing lessons from this comparison for possible Green New Deals.
Keywords: Green New Deal; Karl Polanyi; New Deal; degrowth; embeddedness

Società, mercato, libertà. Karl Polanyi e Friedrich von Hayek - BIONDI, NICCOLO (2021)
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.
Keywords: HAYEK, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992; capitalism; markets

On Polanyi - Munck, Ronaldo (Area Development and Policy, 2021)
Karl Polanyi provides a rich repertoire of concepts to build a critical understanding of the world of globalization and alternatives to the status quo. In reviewing two recent collections around the work of Polanyi, we show some of the concepts that might be developed in terms of ‘using Polanyi’. This would include his inspired double-movement concept and the way he dealt with non-capitalist societies. Polanyi is as relevant for the so-called developing societies as he is for the advanced industrial societies where he has garnered most attention.
Keywords: Polanyi; double movement; globalización; globalization; movimiento doble; no capitalista; non-capitalist; Поланьи; глобализация; двойное движение; некапиталистический.; 全球化; 双重运动; 波兰尼; 非资本主义

Karl Polanyi and the Reappraisal of Happiness Economics - Özveren, Eyüp; Gürpinar, Erkan; Karagöz, Ufuk (Journal of Economic Issues, 2021)
Happiness economics unearths the undesirable effects of economic growth and criticizes the economic model based on the belief in the supremacy of market relations over the relational bonds of society. Economic growth brings about substantial increases in material well-being; yet, it has the potential to destroy the social and environmental fabric of society. This is visible in the post-World War II cross-country variability of the subjective well-being measures, which shows the importance of relational goods and associational activities. These themes echo Karl Polanyi’s concerns over the destructive effects of the self-regulating market mechanism. In this paper, we demonstrate the relevance of the interdisciplinary work of Polanyi for happiness economics. We argue that Polanyi’s conception of the self-regulating market system comes together with the spread of unhappiness. The treatment of labor as a fictitious commodity is of utmost significance in this respect. No less important is the similar degrading of land, a proxy for environment. Furthermore, the distinction Polanyi maintained between “exploitation” and “cultural degeneration” in assessing the Industrial Revolution is useful for this critique. In essence, Polanyi’s approach is relevant to explain the deterioration of social relations, which is thought to be the ultimate reason behind the happiness paradox.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi; consumption; happiness; hedonism; self-regulating market system

MERCADOS E PRAÇAS DE MERCADO: KARL POLANYI E O CAPITALISMO CONTEMPORÂNEO - Parpet, Marie France Garcia (Sociologia & Antropologia, 2021)
Resumo Explorando as distinções conceituais entre mercado, sistema de mercados formadores de preço e praça de mercado, concebidas por Karl Polanyi, o artigo mostra a pertinência dessas diferenças para a análise do capitalismo contemporâneo, ao focalizar a caracterização e os efeitos específicos de praças de mercado da atualidade. Evoca a contribuição de Polanyi para repensar o conceito de mercado tal como referido na literatura econômica e especificar a historicidade dos mercados, sobretudo do sistema de mercados formadores de preço (equivalente de sistema capitalista), opondo esses conceitos a praças de mercado. Recorre a trabalhos etnográficos e/ou sociológicos, sobre praças de mercado contemporâneas, verificando que elas existem nas configurações atuais das trocas mercantis e podem criar valor simbólico e material, estando na origem de processos de diferenciação social, intensificados, por exemplo, no caso das plataformas digitais.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi; Mercado; institucionalização; plataformas digitais.; praça de mercado; salões de exposição; sistema de mercados

CAPITALISM, DEMOCRACY, AND SOCIAL THEORY IN KARL POLANYI: AN INTERVIEW WITH GARETH DALE - Santos, Rodrigo Salles Pereira dos; Onto, Gustavo Gomes (Sociologia & Antropologia, 2021)
Resumo Uma introdução à entrevista realizada com Gareth Dale (Brunel University) − economista político e especialista na trajetória e na obra de Karl Polanyi − e a um conjunto de textos inspirados na abordagem polanyiana publicados neste número de S&A. Recupera questões-chave apresentadas na entrevista e na obra de Dale, dando relevo à literatura recente produzida sobre o autor, à contínua e difundida relevância das ideias de Polanyi para a compreensão do capitalismo e da democracia, e a uma leitura crítica e aberta de suas contribuições teóricas. Divulga as contribuições específicas, teóricas e empíricas, de quatro artigos originais que mobilizam ativamente conceitos polanyianos no entendimento da pluralidade dos processos de enraizamento e das dinâmicas do movimento duplo, de mercantilização da terra e do trabalho, e da centralidade da praça de mercado no capitalismo contemporâneo; além dos aportes de um registro de pesquisa e duas resenhas sobre agências e pedagogias econômicas e financeirização da vida cotidiana. An introduction to the interview with Gareth Dale (Brunel University) − a political economist and expert on Karl Polanyi’s life and work − and to a set of papers, inspired by the Polanyian approach, published in the current issue of S&A. The paper highlights key questions presented in the interview and in Dale’s work, with a focus on the recent literature produced about the author, the continuous and widespread relevance of Polanyi’s ideas for the understanding of capitalism and democracy, and a critical and open reading of his theoretical contributions. Next, the paper presents the specific contributions, both theoretical and empirical, of four original papers that actively dip into Polanyian concepts in understanding the plurality of the embeddedness processes and the dynamics of the double movement, the commodification of land and labor, and the centrality of the marketplace in contemporary capitalism; as well as the contributions of a research recording and of two book reviews on economic agencies and pedagogies and the financialization of everyday life.
Keywords: DALE, Gareth; Karl Polanyi; capitalism; democracy; market

The unfinished development of the frontier: a Karl Polanyi reading of the conflict between the forestry industry, Mapuche communities and the Chilean State - Undurraga, Tomás; Márquez, Felipe (Sociologia & Antropologia, 2021)
Resumo O artigo explora conflitos entre a indústria florestal, as comunidades Mapuche e o Estado chileno à luz da leitura de Polanyi sobre a expansão capitalista. Oferece análise histórico-institucional das maneiras pelas quais o Estado chileno usou a florestação para domar uma fronteira selvagem e os povos nativos que ali vivem. Argumenta que o aumento da violência nessa zona responde à crescente militarização do Estado na área e reflete o contramovimento de proteção social iniciado pelo povo Mapuche - contra uma indústria florestal de livre mercado que transformou a paisagem, limitando o acesso dos Mapuche a terras e florestas, e contra um processo de modernização liderado pelo Estado chileno que corroeu as instituições tradicionais dos Mapuche e lhes ofereceu integração em termos desiguais, como “campesinos pobres”.
Keywords: Chile; Estado chileno; Mapuche; Polanyi; contramovimento; countermovement; forest industry; indústria florestal; proteção social; social protection

Platform Power and Regulatory Politics: Polanyi for the 21st Century - Cioffi, John W.; Kenney, Martin; Zysman, John (2021)
The rapid rise, expansion, and growing asymmetric power of online platform firms towards other businesses, labor and even the state itself occurred in a context of minimal regulatory oversight. In many respects, because the existing legal system was handicapped in understanding and regulating the new platform business models. The platform firms undermined traditional industry boundaries and developed surprising synergies by expanding in unexpected ways due to their ability leverage data and computational expertise. The growth of these platforms was accompanied by minimal intervention by state actors until recently, as concerns about the platform firms’ remarkable power has attracted the concern of States globally and the previous regime is giving way to intense debate and increasingly interventionist governmental policies and enforcement actions. We examine several salient aspects of this emerging regulatory and political reaction, and suggest that this represents an attempt to rebalance the positions of social groups in their relationship to the increasingly central platform firms. First, we view the rise of, and recent political responses to, the often-predatory power and manipulative conduct of platform firm in terms of a “Polanyian” double movement in which the destabilizing and destructive effects of unchecked corporate power and market development eventually generates political and regulatory responses to constrain private actions by new economic actors as they threaten the social, political, and economic order. Second, incipient legal changes, most notably the EU’s proposed Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, indicate a shift in regulatory emphasis from competition (and antitrust) policy and law, which has proven limited in its capacity to address inherent monopolistic tendencies of platform firms and markets, towards more intensive and encompassing forms of social and economic regulation. Finally, the political dynamics of legal and institutional change open up new possibilities for political economic and societal reordering, but the particular changes will likely vary in character and significance across political jurisdictions, and therefore follow distinctive and possibly divergent developmental trajectories. We hypothesize that the EU may be able to become the first-mover in regulating the powerful multinational platform firms. We recognize that we are at the very beginning of a transformational process that is likely to reorder old and generate new political economic interests, identities, coalitions, and conflicts at the sectoral, national, regional, and international levels.
Keywords: European Union; Platform economy; Polanyi; antitrust; monopoly

Constituting the Political Economy of the Kurds: Social Embeddedness, Hegemony, and Identity - Tekdemir, Omer (Routledge, 2021)
This book examines the development of Kurdish political economy and the emergence of collective Kurdish identity within a historical context through three main periods: the late-Ottoman Empire, the initial Republican Turkey era, and then the post-1990s period. It relates historical developments to the dynamics of Kurdish society, including the anthropological realities of the nineteenth century through the moral economy frame, the evolving nature of nationalism in the early twentieth century and the more recent construction of a modern political Kurdishness by means of radical democracy, and an agonistic pluralism shaped by left-wing populism.
Keywords: Kurdistan; Political Science / World / Middle Eastern; embeddedness; ethnic studies; middle eastern studies; regional studies

New Limits of the Neoliberalism: Society and Market - Vidal, Laura; Correa, Eugenia (Journal of Economic Issues, 2021)
Neoliberalism has been able to change the markets and the economy of societies around the world. These transformations are especially important with regards to fictitious commodities: land, labor, and money. However, the 2020 pandemic imposes new limits, when life itself is at risk globally. This work highlights the major neoliberal reforms relating to fictitious commodities, the difficulties of society to resist and create counterweights. The health crisis that has emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of decades of over-exploitation of nature and human beings. The reforms over fictitious commodities, especially labor, have led to a constant and systematic decline of society. This article is supported by the theoretical legacy of Karl Polanyi and Kari Polanyi Levitt that allows us to consider the most important trends of neoliberal reforms and their main objectives.
Keywords: fictitious commodities; health crisis; neoliberal counterrevolution; neoliberalism

Non-market institutions and crime in US counties: Hayek v. Polanyi - Zullo, Roland (Review of Social Economy, 2021)
Karl Polanyi’s The great transformation emphasized the importance of non-market institutions for social equity and stability. In that same era, Friedrich Hayek postulated in The road to serfdom that superior economies were market-based and featured minimal government. I compare these worldviews in relation to property and violent crime. Using US county data, change in crime is modeled as a function of economic structure, economic conditions, and demographics. Consistent with Polanyi, the size of the public sector in the economy negatively associates with crime. Within the public sector, education is a critical crime-reducing function, more so than law enforcement. Industry diversity is positively associated with crime, contrary to Hayek. Manufacturing equates with lower crime and the size of the private non-profit sector is unrelated to crime. Overall the results favor Polanyi’s assertion that non-market institutions are necessary to counter the harsh outcomes arising from market economic systems.
Keywords: H41 (public goods); P17 (capitalism performance); Socialism; Z13 (economic sociology); crime; laissez-faire; non-market institutions; public goods

On the meaning and contemporary significance of fascism in the writings of Karl Polanyi - Millett, Kris (Theory and Society, 2021)
This paper assesses the contribution of Karl Polanyi, a theorist largely ignored in fascism scholarship, toward understanding fascism’s interwar rise and present-day implications. In exploring Polanyi’s work in The Great Transformation and lesser-known and unpublished writings, a sophisticated and largely original conception of fascism emerges, rooted in the idea of ‘anti-individualism’ as its foundational trait. Polanyi accounts for fascism’s philosophical content, ideological plasticity, political function and societal form, intervening in debates over how to define fascism, its ambiguity with the populist far-right, and on its both economically reactionary and socially revolutionary qualities. Polanyi’s analysis suggests an enduring vulnerability on the part of liberal capitalism to fascist currents as (1) a solution to the instability of the market economy (and broader incompatibility between capitalism and democracy) at the systemic level, and (2) to the crisis of the individual subject on a social and moral level. I end by considering how Polanyi’s theory might be applied to locate current neo-fascist movements and elucidate the sociological problems underpinning their existence.
Keywords: Anti-individualism; Fascism; Neo-fascism; Polanyi; Totalitarianism; Vitalism

Karl Polanyi: a theorist of mixed economies - Szelényi, Iván; Mihályi, Péter (Theory and Society, 2021)
Karl Polanyi’s scholarship is interpreted in radically different ways. The “hard” reading of Polanyi sees him as a radical socialist; the “soft” reading presents him as a theorist of mixed economy. This article sides with the soft interpretation. It uses Polanyi’s biography to explain his theoretical “elusiveness,” presents a novel interpretation of his three types of economic integration, claiming all economies are “mixed.” While it acknowledges Polanyi as one of the major sources of world system theory, it claims that Polanyi saw not only the dangers, but also the necessity and positive consequences of globalization. Finally, it shows that, in spite of Polanyi’s life-long commitment to the political left, his scholarly work did not offer an apology of socialism. Instead this article uses Polanyi’s theory of economic integration to build a critical political economy of state socialism.
Keywords: capitalism; reciprocity; redistribution; rent-seeking; socialism; world system theory

Our Obsolete Marketing Mentality: George Fisk, Meet Karl Polanyi - Benton, Raymond (Journal of Macromarketing, 2021)
Marketing in general can have greater influence if a new, yet old, perspective on marketing is adopted—something akin to the original orientation of marketing. Adopting George Fisk’s definition of marketing and marrying it with notions derived from the institutional economist Karl Polanyi is proposed. The histories of marketing thought and of institutional economics are reviewed to demonstrate their affinity and similar origins. Fisk’s conceptualization of marketing as societies’ provisioning systems is shown to correspond with Polanyi’s conceptualization of economies as instituted processes, admitting more than the market and the state as ways economies have historically and cross-culturally integrated with society. The obsolete marketing mentality is that marketers, including macromarketers, are overly fixated on the market and ignore or overlook alternatives. The Fisk/Polanyi orientation will attract macromarketers interested in marketing and development, critical marketing, sustainability, alternative economies, and those interested in the long-term prospects of macromarketing. Adopting this old, but new, framework will connect the past with the future, permit macromarketers make a mark on a larger intellectual landscape and serve to invite scholars in this larger landscape to engage with macromarketing.
Keywords: Future of Macromarketing; George Fisk; German Historical School; History of Economic Thought; Institutional Economics; Karl Polanyi; Marketing and Economics; history of marketing thought; macromarketing

Going public with Polanyi in the era of Trump * - Burawoy, Michael (The Routledge International Handbook of Public Sociology, 2021)
After considering different possible elements of the ‘Trump era,’ I will turn to The Great Transformation to periodize capitalism into three waves of marketization and their counter-movements. In the first wave, we follow the commodification of land, money and especially labor, so-called fictitious commodities, and the local counter-movements marketization inspired, reaching to the level of the state. In the second wave, the focus turns on the way marketization generated a reaction from states, seeking to regulate commodification – in other words, processes of de-commodification. Given the tension between capitalism and democracy, in Polanyi’s view essentially two forms of regulation were possible: either democracy suppresses capitalism and we get socialism, or capitalism suppresses democracy and we get fascism. He neither paid much attention to the popular forces that led in either direction nor to the possibility of a compromise between capitalism and democracy that reigned in three decades after World War Two. Beginning in the 1970s, we witnessed the beginning of a third wave of marketization – more commonly known as neoliberalism – that Polanyi did not anticipate. I attribute his failure to anticipate another wave of marketization to the contradictory pressures of accumulation that are temporarily alleviated by commodification. In this third wave, I show how democracy is discredited, and consensus politics dissolves into polarizing movements within and beyond parliamentary politics. The lived experience driving these movements, I argue, revolves around processes of re-commodification and ex-commodification of nature, money, labor and knowledge. This is the terrain upon which sociology must engage its publics. I highlight two approaches, both founded on an organic public sociology that engages directly with publics. On the one hand, there is the empathic public sociology that wades into communities in order to comprehend the distinctive ‘deep narrative’ of right wing populism, typified by Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. On the other hand, there is the affirmative public sociology that creates a collective vision based on a dialogue with the practitioners of real utopias, typified by Erik Wright’s How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century.
Keywords: Trumpism; marketization; public sociology

Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation - Ebner, Alexander (Schlüsselwerke der Wirtschaftssoziologie, 2021)
Karl Polanyi war in jungen Jahren Zeitzeuge der vielschichtigen ökonomischen, sozialen und politischen Umwälzungen in der österreichisch-ungarischen Donaumonarchie. 1886 in Wien geboren, wuchs er in Budapest auf, wo er Rechtswissenschaft und Philosophie studierte, um dann nach der Zerschlagung der ungarischen Räterepublik nach Wien zurückzukehren. Dort schrieb er für die wirtschaftspolitische Wochenzeitschrift „Österreichischer Volkswirt“.
Keywords: biography

Instituições Sociais e Sistema Econômico: a perspectiva de Karl Polanyi - Freitas, Tales Rabelo (Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de Economia Política, 2021)
For Karl Polanyi, the economic system cannot be analyzed in isolation from social institutions. The economicism fallacy neglects social variables that are fundamental for determining economic action and systemic transformations. This implies that the rise of the self-regulated market system and its dominance over social institutions are not a natural movement when analyzed in the light of the entire history of human societies. For the author, what happened was a kind of uprooting of the economy, although this movement has been supported in a very specific institutional context in the past, and with no possibility of sustainability. As the economy is a by-product of social institutions, the Polanyian approach understands that any analysis, whether of economic dynamics or its transformations, must be carried out taking into account the needs of society as a whole.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi; economicismo; economism; instituições; institutions

Wirtschaftsethik der ›always embedded market economy‹. Überlegungen zu einer Idee von Polanyi - Haase, Michaela (Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Unternehmensethik, 2021)
Capitalism is a social relation that cannot be reduced to the characteristics associated with it - markets, private property, profit and profit orientation. This relation can be shaped in different ways. The article refers to Karl Polanyi’s idea of the ›always embedded market economy‹ in order to develop basic characteristics of an example of post-capitalist economic ethics. Alternate abstract: Der Kapitalismus ist ein soziales Verhältnis, das sich nicht auf die mit ihm in Verbindung gebrachten Merkmale - Märkte, Privateigentum, Gewinn- und Profitorientierung - reduzieren lässt. Dieses Verhältnis kann auf verschiedene Weise ausgestaltet werden. Der Beitrag referiert auf die Idee der ›always embedded market economy‹ von Karl Polanyi, um Grundzüge einer postkapitalistischen Wirtschaftsethik zu entwickeln.
Keywords: business and economics; capitalism; ethics; market economies; philosophy; private property

Competition in transitional processes: Polanyi & Schumpeter - Hager, Theresa; Heck, Ines; Rath, Johanna (ICAE Working Paper Series, 2021)
We examine parallels and differences in the analyses of societal transition by Karl Polanyi and Joseph A. Schumpeter. We argue that although their understanding of historical processes differs - transformational-political vs. evolutionary-natural - the central mechanism of change they describe is the same. We identify three spheres essential to both authors' works: the economic, the political and the socio-cultural sphere. Polanyi and Schumpeter describe an expansion of the economic sphere culminating in a subordination of the other parts of society. In capitalism this dominance stems from capitalism's emergence as well as the concept of competition. The consequence is a profound change in societal relations. Changes in the socio-cultural sphere in turn produce changes in the political sphere that bring about detrimental consequences for democracy. In our paper we carve out the similarities as well as the differences in the respective theories, clarify the role competition plays therein and discuss the consequences for the political process. We adopt an analytical framework that puts the nearly analogous mechanism of change in the centre. This in turn enables us to make use of the complementarity and to gain valuable insights on the interdependence of capitalism and democracy that can inform trends and phenomena that are currently observed.
Keywords: SCHUMPETER, Joseph Alois, 1883-1950; competition; interdependence

Fascism and the enduring problem of the liberal individual in Polanyi - Millett, Kris (Dewey Studies, 2021)
This application of Polanyi to the question of fascism’s resurgence provides an important corrective to mainstream liberal explanations (e.g., Albright 2018), inviting the reader to “look up rather than down” (Lim 2021) by tying fascism’s significance to the functioning of the capitalist system rather than to the personalities of fascist politicians or their degree of mass support. The merits of this notwithstanding, I argue that current Polanyian treatments have neglected to engage with a core aspect of Polanyi’s theory, which is that fascism, at its roots, is a fundamentally anti-individualist ideology that aims to address a moral and social crisis of the individual subject in liberal capitalism. Omitting this risks obfuscating what makes fascism distinctive as well as why its ideas have retained their appeal.
Keywords: essence of fascism; fascism; individualism

ТРАДИЦИОННАЯ РЫНОЧНАЯ ЭКОНОМИКА И ЕЁ АНТИЦИКЛИЧЕСКИЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ В ОЦЕНКАХ ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЕЙ XIX-XX ВЕКОВ - Анатольевич, Орлянский Евгений (Наука о человеке: гуманитарные исследования, 2021)
The article deals with the first stage of the market economic system - the traditional market economy. The traditional market economy is considered in the assessment of its main researchers. The main goal of the study is to identify the main characteristics and features of the traditional economy, which would explain the absence of pronounced cyclical elements in it. It is assumed that several essential elements of such an economy carry the strongest countercyclical potential. The article uses the methodology of comparative analysis, which will help to find common ground among the most famous researchers of the traditional market economy. The study of the traditional market economic system was carried out in the context of overcoming the stereotype of the closed development of economic processes and the impossibility of influencing them by non-economic factors. This is confirmed by the fact that most of the countercyclical elements of the traditional market economy are derived from the spiritual and ethical sphere. At the same time, an integral part of the article is the position that this economic system retains all the characteristic features of a market economy. The traditional market economy practically did not experience cyclical tendencies in its development. This was due to the fact that this economic system contained built-in elements that ensured the absence in the traditional economy of both cyclicality itself and periodic cyclical crises.

Ecology, Democracy, and COVID-19: Rereading and radicalizing Karl Polanyi - Ryan, J. Michael (COVID-19: Volume I: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions, 2020)
The SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the associated COVID-19 pandemic, is perhaps the greatest threat to life, and lifestyles, the world has known in more than a century. The scholarship included here provides critical insights into the ethics and ideologies, inequalities, and changed social understandings that lie at the heart of this pandemic. This volume maps out the ways in which the pandemic has impacted (most often disproportionately) societies, the successes and failures of means used to combat the virus, and the considerations and future possibilities – both positive and negative – that lie ahead. While the pandemic has brought humanity together in some noteworthy ways, it has also laid bare many of the systemic inequalities that lie at the foundation of our global society. This volume is a significant step toward better understanding these impacts. The work presented here represents a remarkable diversity and quality of impassioned scholarship and is a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to the pandemic. This volume and its companion, COVID-19: Volume II: Social Consequences and Cultural Adaptations, are the result of the collaboration of more than 50 of the leading social scientists from across five continents. The breadth and depth of the scholarship is matched only by the intellectual and global scope of the contributors themselves. The insights presented here have much to offer not just to an understanding of the ongoing world of COVID-19, but also to helping us (re-) build, and better shape, the world beyond.
Keywords: COVID-19; disease & health Issues; health

Karl Polanyi and the Contemporary Political Crisis: Transforming Market Society in the Era of Climate Change - Kirby, Peadar (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
Has politics reached breaking point? Rather than defending liberalism or abandoning it, how can a socially just and ecological alternative be built? Peadar Kirby investigates the causes of our current multifaceted global crisis by drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi. This book explores Polanyi's theory that social disruptions result from the attempt to run society according to the rules of the market. Drawing on these ideas, it outlines pathways towards an alternative future that overcome weaknesses in Marxism. Linking the ecological, political and socio-economic crises, Kirby identifies that an alternative socio-ecological model is emerging, consistent with the insights of Polanyi. Karl Polanyi and the Contemporary Political Crisis is an urgent intervention into key debates on the future of politics, on the low-carbon transition, on automation and on the emerging world order.
Keywords: climate change; ecological crisis

Karl Polanyi on strategy: The effects of culture, morality and double-movements on embedded strategy - Faulconbridge, James R.; Muzio, Daniel (Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 2020)
Karl Polanyi is arguably one of the most significant economic sociologists. At first glance the links between Polanyi’s ideas about markets, society and institutions and strategy may not be obvious. However, there is a hereto unrecognised link between recent writing about institutions and strategy and Polanyi’s work. In this paper we, therefore, chart how, when recognised, these links reveal that Karl Polanyi’s work might provide new ways of thinking about strategy. Our over-riding claim is that Polanyi’s ideas reveal the importance of considering how strategies are defined, responded to, and ultimately rendered effective or ineffective in ways that are determined by relationships between markets, the state and society. It is thus crucial to understand strategy as embedded, this implying consideration of a strategy’s legitimacy in economy and society as an instituted process at any particular place and time. This also implies wider political questions about strategy in society and the extent to which strategists need to be aware of the ‘double movement’ Polanyi discusses and ensure strategies serve the interests of society as well as those of the market.
Keywords: Double movement; Globalization; Law firms; Polanyi; Strategy

Território e Desenvolvimento em Karl Polanyi: uma revisão sistemática - Rodrigues, Waldecy; Camargo, Wainesten (Redes, 2020)
This paper consists of a systematic review of the literature on territorial economic development from the perspective of Karl Polanyi's works. For this, a protocol was created to order the selection of scientific articles, after this step, an analysis of the main works that used Karl Polanyi ideas, on the perspective from territorial development, in a central way in their approaches was performed. The main databases used were SCOPUS, WEB OF SCIENCE and SCIELO, from 1990 to 2018. About 100 (one hundred) papers were found that met the protocol of the systematic review. All these works have been read and their details and characteristics can be found in this text. It was identified that Karl Polanyi has a classical approach to territory, and his most discussed ideas are the double movement, embeddedness, and economic history. The main results point to the strength of Karl Polanyi thought in research on development in several territorial scales, allowing to think these issues in interdisciplinary and plural terms.
Keywords: desenvolvimento; development; systematic review; territorial development; território

A Polanyi-inspired perspective on social-ecological transformations of cities - Bärnthaler, Richard; Novy, Andreas; Stadelmann, Basil (Journal of Urban Affairs, 2020)
Based on a Polanyi-inspired research program, we analyze urban transformations as interrelations between infrastructural configurations, i.e. context-dependent material infrastructures and their multi-scalar political-economic regulations, and socio-cultural modes of living. Describing different modes of infrastructure provisioning in Vienna between 1890 and today, we illustrate how political-economic processes of commodification and decommodification have co-evolved with socio-culturally specific modes of living, grounded in different classes and milieus. We show how, today, two modes of living—“traditional,” established during postwar welfare capitalism, and “liberal,” formed during neoliberal capitalism—co-exist. In the current conjuncture of rising inequality, neoliberal urban regeneration, and accelerating climate crisis, these modes of living are not only increasingly polarized and antagonistic, but also increasingly unable to satisfy needs and self-defined aspirations. Therefore, we explore the potential of social-ecological infrastructural configurations as an alliance-building project for a systemic social-ecological transformation, potentially linking different classes, social segments and forces around a common eco-social endeavor.

Polanyi meets Bolsonaro: Reactionary politics and the double movement in twenty-first-century Brazil - Evans, Peter (International Sociology, 2020)
Twenty-first-century Brazil’s political evolution is a window on the dynamics of contemporary political transitions. The inability of Brazil’s Workers’ Party to sustain its social democratic project and the subsequent rise of the reactionary regime of Jair Bolsonaro are, in turn, part of a global pattern of political change. Karl Polanyi’s vision of the ‘double movement,’ in which the dominance of the market vies with the countervailing movement for social protection, offers an analytical springboard for reflecting on these political transitions. Trying to understand the movement for social protection leads to examining ebbs and flows in the momentum of mobilization. Trying to understand how market dominance leads to reaction brings us back to Polanyi’s advocacy of ‘crass materialism’ as a lens for looking at reaction, and from there to consideration of how the structural power of capital undercuts efforts at social protection and opens the door to reaction.
Keywords: Brasil; Brazil; Brésil; Polanyi; finance; finanzas; protección social; protection sociale; reacción; reaction; réaction; social protection

Re-grounding the city with Polanyi: From urban entrepreneurialism to entrepreneurial municipalism - Thompson, Matthew; Nowak, Vicky; Southern, Alan; Davies, Jackie; Furmedge, Peter (Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2020)
Conventional approaches to local economic development are failing to address deepening polarisation both within and between city regions across advanced capitalist economies. At the same time, austerity urbanism, particularly in the UK, presents challenges for urban authorities facing reduced budgets to meet increased demands on public services. Municipalities are beginning to experiment with creative responses to these crises, such as taking more interventionist and entrepreneurial roles in developing local economies, generating alternative sources of revenue or financialising existing assets. Rooted in a Polanyian perspective and building on the concepts of the entrepreneurial state and grounded city, we identify an embryonic alternative approach – what we call ‘entrepreneurial municipalism’ – as a policy pathway towards resolving enduring socioeconomic problems where neoliberal urban-entrepreneurial strategies have failed. We situate entrepreneurial municipalism as one strand in an assemblage of new municipalist interventions, between radical urban social movements and more neoliberal strategies such as financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. Drawing on original research on the Liverpool City Region, we explore how local authorities are working with social enterprises to harness place-based assets in ways which de-commodify land, labour and capital and re-embed markets back into society. Finally, we draw upon Polanyi as our guide to disentangle differences in approach amongst divergent forms of municipalist statecraft and to critically evaluate entrepreneurial municipalism as a possible trajectory towards the grounded city.
Keywords: Entrepreneurial state; Polanyian economic geography; local economic development; municipal statecraft; urban policy

BRIE Working Paper 2020-6 What Polanyi Teaches Us: The Platform Economy and Structural Change - Eldred, Christopher (The Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, 2020)
The welfare system was meant to reduce the 9 vulnerability of citizens to the market, thereby containing the consequences of the market economy and labor commodification. [...] As an adaptation to the consequences of the market, the welfare system is an effort to cushion the effects of the market, not a change its underlying logic of commodification. [...] From this perspective, the political debates about the rules to be applied to the operations of the platform economy are part of the “second movement,” i.e., a reaction to the platform economy. [...] In contrast, to the industrial revolution where the capitalist moved production into the factory to develop greater control than was possible with the putting-out system, the platform extrudes the work and obligations outside the boundaries of the firm. [...] In actuality the relationship between the members of the ecosystem and the platform is hierarchical and based upon an extreme power asymmetry within which the ecosystem members are at the mercy of the platform which controls the nexus of relationships (Cutolo and Kenney, 2020).
Keywords: platform economy; welfare

Capitalismo e lutas sociais: abordagens recentes à articulação entre Marx e Polanyi - Filho, Ricardo Framil (Cadernos CERU, 2020)
The article explores recent contributions that rely on the combination of ideas from Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi to conceptualize social struggles. Two approaches are presented: selective perspectives, which highlighted the differences between class struggles as defined by the Marxist tradition and social reactions theorized by Karl Polanyi’s double movement, and inclusive viewpoints, that emphasized the potential convergence between these different expressions of contestation. Thus, we seek the basic elements of a theory of the structural roots of social struggles in contemporary capitalism. Thereafter, the article explores with greater attention the theories of Michael Burawoy and Nancy Fraser. A comparative reading indicates that this theoretical project is promising because it allows for social struggles to be linked to systemic contradictions, but it also shows that relevant conceptual difficulties persist. The conclusion is that more than a definitive theory, the debates raised by this theoretical outlook suggest central questions for the reflection on labor, classes and capitalist societies at large. O artigo explora contribuições recentes que propuseram a articulação teórica entre ideias de Karl Marx e de Karl Polanyi para conceptualizar as lutas sociais. São identificadas duas abordagens: perspectivas seletivas, que destacaram as diferenças entre as lutas de classes tal como definidas pela tradição marxista e as reações sociais teorizadas pela tese do duplo movimento de Karl Polanyi, e sínteses ecléticas, que enfatizaram a convergência potencial entre essas diferentes expressões de contestação social. Buscam-se, assim, os elementos fundamentais de uma teoria das raízes estruturais das lutas sociais no capitalismo contemporâneo. Explora-se com maior cuidado, então, as teorias de Michael Burawoy e de Nancy Fraser. Uma leitura comparativa indica que essa orientação teórica é promissora porque permite associar as lutas sociais a contradições sistêmicas, mas revela, também, que persistem dificuldades conceituais relevantes. Conclui-se que mais do que uma teoria definitiva, os debates suscitados por essa vertente teórica sugerem questões centrais para a reflexão sobre o trabalho, as classes e as sociedades capitalistas em um sentido amplo.
Keywords: MARX, Karl, 1818-1883; capitalismo; duplo movimento; lutas de classes; lutas sociais

Pandemic Paradox and Polanyi: Financial Markets Rise, Economies Crash, and Regulators Toss a Coin - Findlay, Mark (2020)
In the pandemic, investors like all responsible citizens share an obligation to keep the community safe. This obligation extends to informed market decision-making which goes beyond self-interest. The current disconnect between financial markets and the economy is a story of two different realities – or perhaps one harsh reality and one expectant gamble. The disconnect cannot just be explained by the different purposes of economic and financial market analysis but rather by the information indicators on which these rely. To forewarn regulators concerned that these two worlds of global wealth generation and growth moving to polar opposite futures, this brief review has these aims:• To reflect on a legal model for financial markets, their regulation and its limitations so that law and finance may be understood as positively relational when considering market sustainability; and then• To suggest that the explanation for this dangerous disconnect can be found in Karl Polanyi’s understanding of fictitious commodities in self-regulating markets, dis-embedding from the social and his propositions for market correction through the double movement.Despite the neoliberal logic to the contrary (where financial markets are deemed only for maximising investor/shareholder profit) financial market regulation should prioritise market sustainability as part of pandemic control policy.
Keywords: disconnect; economy; financial markets; market sustainability and resilience; pandemic crisis; responsible market decision-making

Commodification & countermovement: community-supported agriculture (CSA): a case study in Minas Gerais, Brazil - Matzembacher, Daniele Eckert; Meira, Fabio Bittencourt (Organizações & Sociedade, 2020)
The conventional way of producing and distributing food is based on the use of agrochemicals, fertilizers, industrial fertilizers and other techniques from the Green Revolution, with increasing dependence on financial-industrial capital, which implies the intensification of the agriculture commodification. The object of this study was the emergence of modes of organization resisting this trend. Based on the theoretical reference of Karl Polanyi (2012a, 2012b), a case study was developed in a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) initiative. It is a movement that resituates agricultural production through the principles of fair trade, agroecology and the use of short supply chains, which bring production and consumption closer together. The result is a better nutritious quality food at affordable and fair price. The analysis of the CSA Alfa case points to the coexistence of different principles of regulation, in a combination of mercantile exchange and reciprocity. According to the proposition by Karl Polanyi, the economic activity is shown to imbricate with the social aspect, of which friendship, tolerance, fidelity and commitment establish a community ethos around food. The CSA seems to manifest a countermovement to the commodification by enhancing the relative autonomy of individuals that elevates the social cohesion of the participating groups. Resumo A forma que se tornou convencional de produzir e distribuir alimentos baseia-se no uso de agroquímicos, adubos, fertilizantes industriais e de outras técnicas provenientes da Revolução Verde, com crescente dependência do capital financeiro-industrial. Isto significa a intensificação da mercantilização da agricultura. O problema que norteou esta pesquisa é a emergência de modos de organização resistentes a essa tendência. Com base no referencial teórico de Karl Polanyi (2012a, 2012b), construiu-se um estudo de caso cujo objeto é a agricultura sustentada pela comunidade, cujo acrônimo em inglês é CSA (community supported agriculture). Trata-se de um movimento que ressitua a produção agrícola pelos princípios do comércio justo e da agroecologia e uso de cadeias curtas que aproximam produção e consumo. O resultado é um alimento de qualidade nutritiva superior a preço acessível e justo. A análise do caso CSA Alfa aponta a coexistência de diferentes princípios de regulação numa combinação de troca mercantil e reciprocidade. Na esteira de Karl Polanyi, observa-se a atividade econômica imbricada ao social, daí que amizade, tolerância, fidelidade e comprometimento estabelecem um ethos comunitário em torno do alimento. A CSA parece manifestar um contramovimento à mercantilização ao potencializar a autonomia relativa dos indivíduos, o que eleva a coesão social dos grupos participantes.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi; commodification; community-supported agriculture; reciprocity; social cohesion

Transformation or Structural Change? What Polanyi Can Teach Us about the Platform Economy - Kenney, Martin; Zysman, John; Bearson, Dafna (2020)
The rise of the platform economy marks the latest phase in the ongoing digital revolution. Indeed, the platform is to this digital era what the factory was to the industrial era, both a symbol and an organizing mechanism. Gernot Grabher and Jonas König (2020) used Karl Polanyi’s analysis of what he termed the “great transformation” to frame the rise of platform economy. The platform economy is remarkable as it confirms Polanyi’s (and Marx’s before him) insight that the reach of the market is based upon increased commodification as it has been able to reach into ever more parts of social life. We introduced the term “platform economy” in 2015 because we recognized that the digital platforms were changing the dynamics of capitalist accumulation —- an analysis framed by regulationist school of political economy. The intuition was that the socio-technical innovation of digital online platforms was the critical fulcrum for an economic restructuring that would rewire the flows of data and ultimately money and power. The firms we have termed the “mega-platforms”, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have become the most valuable and powerful firms in the world. Importantly, the reach of these platforms is global and yet local and personal. Moreover, this platform power has only been reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Keywords: COVID-19; Great Transformation; Polanyi; platform economy

현대 사회적경제의 기원에 대한 시론: Karl Polanyi의 경제사상으로부터 - 권병욱; 이준우 (사회적가치와 기업연구, 2020)
본 논문은 최근 대중적 관심을 불러일으키는 사회적경제를 주목하여 그 이론적 기원을 탐색하기 위한 목적을 가지고 있다. 이 작업은 다수의 연구자들과 활동가들에게 사회적경제에 대한 이해의 지평을 넓히고 보다 풍부하게 사회적경제에 대한 접근의 근거를 제공할 것이다. 다양한 분야에서 어려움에 직면하고 있는 우리 사회의 현실을 감안할 때, 새로운 대안경제로 사회적경제의 타당성 차원에서도 필요한 작업이다. 실제로, 기존 경제학은 합리적인 인간을 전제로 자기조정적인 시장메커니즘에 의한 이윤 극대화논리를 발전시켜 왔다. 가격을 매개로 시장의 무오류적 완결성을 고착해 온 것이다. 그러나 시장이 적절하게 기능하지 못하고 정부의 개입에 의해 해결되지 못한 다양한 사회문제들에 직면하면서 인간의 발전과 자연의 성숙을 도모하는 새로운 사회적경제의 가능성이 중시되고 있는 실정이다. 이러한 관점에서 본 연구는 주류경제학의 오류와 현대 경제에 대한 폴라니의 비판을 근저에 두고 그가 주목했던 두 명의 혁신적 사상가, 존 벨러스와 로버트 오웬을 통해서 사회적경제의 기원과 본질을 밝히고 그것이 감당해야 할 몫을 분명히 하고자 한다. KM - english title: A Study on the Origin of the Social Economy in Modern Society: Based on Karl Polanyi’s Economic Ideology
Keywords: BELLERS, John; OWEN, Robert; mutual aid; poverty; publicity; reciprocity; social capital; social economy; social enterprise; solidarity

This freedom kills: Karl Polanyi’s quest for an alternative to the liberal vision of freedom - Brie, Michael (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
The chapter reconstructs the emergence and formulation of Karl Polanyi's central research question: How is responsible freedom possible in a complex modern society? The origins of this question in the time before the First World War and the confrontations with the challenge of neoliberalism and fascism are discussed. It is shown that Karl Polanyi's concept of freedom has four dimensions. Polanyi connects negative, positive, substantial and social freedom with each other and formulates a highly innovative research programme which forms the basis for The Great Transformation and later works.
Keywords: freedom; freedom in a complex society

Commodified money and crustacean nations - Desai, Radhika (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
Though Polanyi referred to three distinct fictitious commodities, one, money, and the fate of the apex structure that commodified it, the gold standard, structured The Great Transformation’s narrative. Despite this centrality of money and its commodification to Polanyi’s masterwork, there is near-deafening silence in Polanyi scholarship on money as a fictitious commodity. This chapter ends it. It traces Polanyi’s understanding of fictitious commodities to its sources in classical political economy and explains how the near total dominance of the antithetical tradition of neoclassical economics obscures understanding. The chapter also argues that the resulting argument shared a great deal with the classical Marxist theories of imperialism and of uneven and combined development of previous decades, particularly their arguments about the centrality of powerful nation states to capitalism. It stresses another hitherto neglected aspect of Polanyi’s argument, that the double movement led to the emergence of ‘crustacean nations’. As such, the chapter argues, The Great Transformation contributes a great deal towards a new approach to understanding world affairs, geopolitical economy, which challenges Ricardian ‘universalist’ understandings and takes the ‘materiality of nations’ seriously. It, and Polanyi, are more relevant than ever in our ‘deglobalizing’ age of multi-polarity.
Keywords: Marxism; fictitious commodities; imperialism; money

Introduction: Karl Polanyi in the twenty-first century - Desai, Radhika (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
This introduction places the contributions that follow in the context of Polanyi’s rising influence, its causes and effects, and of the key twenty-first century developments that make his oeuvre more relevant than ever. It emphasizes how the contributions push the boundaries of received understandings of Polanyi. While some contributions fill gaping holes, such as those on money as a fictitious commodity, others overturn received understandings, whether that of the double movement or fictitious commodities, or the provenance (Central European or American) of his principal ideas and concerns or how he understood socialism. Yet others demonstrate how amenable Polanyi’s ideas are to further development. Last but not least, the introduction outlines Polanyi’s historical diagnosis as it emerges from these innovative contributions and argues that the stark choice he felt faced European societies, socialism or fascism, is once again before us as we face the groundswell of nationalist and far right forces.
Keywords: capitalism; contemporary relevance; fascism; socialism

Double movement, embeddedness and the transformation of the financial system - Galarza, Oscar Ugarteche (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
The chapter reviews aspects of the possible transformation of the financial system into a banking complex, that comprises both embedded Too Big to Fail (TBTF) financial institutions and disembedded ones. The transformation of the financial system into a two-tier banking complex is the result of the disconnection of the TBTF embedded institutions and the right size to fail disembedded financial institutions. The chapter revises the scope and consequences of this change on the monopolization of financial capitalism and international financial governance. It contains two sub-sections. The first reviews Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness/ disembeddedness and TBTF; the second reviews the concept of a complex. This chapter aims to use Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness and disembeddedness in order to understand how the category of TBTF financial institutions came into being through the double movement of market deregulation and social regulation. The concepts of embeddedness in social regulation and disembeddedness under market regulation permit an understanding of how, as the few TBTF financial institutions re-embedded themselves, becoming risk proof, the majority remained disembedded and subject to failures. We argue that, given this, the financial system may no longer be considered a system.
Keywords: disembeddedness; double movement; embeddedness; financial system; too big to fail

Debt, land and money: From Polanyi to the new economic archaeology - Hudson, Michael (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
Polanyi spoke of the commodification of money, and this chapter focuses on how interest-bearing debt became the major dynamic, also contributing to the commodification of land and labor. By the late third millennium BC the main way to obtain manual labor was to lend money and make debtors work off their debts as an antichretic interest charge. Personal debt became the lever for creditors to pry land out of the clan-based tenure system, mainly for sale under economic duress. Debtors who pledged their crop or land rights usually ended up forfeiting them. This alienation catalyzed the ‘commodification’ of land. By tracing these debt dynamics, the new economic archaeology is compatible with Polanyi’s intuitions and recognition that market relations are embedded in social relations, and extends his analysis in tracing how administered pricing and monetary valuations created the preconditions for market exchange. The earliest markets, credit and land tenure systems were regulated. Administered pricing was a precondition for creating weights, measures and price equivalencies to enable market exchange to evolve more flexibly.

Multilinear trajectories: Polanyi, The Great Transformation and the American exception - Lacher, Hannes (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
Karl Polanyi’s call, in The Great Transformation, for a re-embedding of markets, is widely understood to have come to fruition in the American New Deal and in the post-war order of ‘embedded liberalism’. Based on archival sources, this chapter shows that Polanyi’s political project was far more radical. Polanyi initially considered the New Deal a vital response to the problems of American capitalism, but one that would have little relevance to the problems and dynamics of European societies. There, he considered a socialist transformation both possible and necessary. But eventually, Polanyi realised that the US, far from remaining an exceptional outlier of ‘nineteenth-century civilisation’, was imposing its model on Britain and Europe. The internationalisation of the American New Deal in the Bretton Woods order marked the defeat of Polanyi’s political project.

Polanyi in space - Peck, Jamie (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
The chapter addresses the potential of Karl Polanyi’s contribution as a spatial theorist, or as an economic geographer in all but name. Although Polanyi did not identify as a spatial or geographical theorist as such, his work is rich with spatial insights and implications, notably as one of the original analysts of economic diversity. The chapter begins by contextualising Polanyi’s work in relation to the shifting locales and vantage points that shaped its production. It then turns to the question of the potential of Polanyi’s research programme (incomplete as it understandably was) for the conceptualisation and exploration of economic geographies. The goal here is to sketch some of the ways in which neoPolanyian approaches can be put to work in the service of geographically sensitive modes of economic inquiry, including those attuned to the ongoing diversity of economic formations and development trajectories, contemporary engagements with uneven spatial development, and the evaluation of (localised) economic experimentation. Polanyi’s programmatic project of ‘comparative economics’ was never completed during his own lifetime. There is much to be gained from resuming this project.

The reality of society - Rotstein, Abraham (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
In these remarkably stirring reflections, delivered at the 2014 conference from which most of the contributions to this volume emerge, the late Abe Rotstein, Polanyi’s student and collaborator, recalls the projected sequel to The Great Transformation, to be titled Freedom and Technology. Whereas the former was built on a social sciences approach using institutional analysis, the sequel was to follow the intention Hegel expressed in the words ‘Wir die religiöse Vorstellung in Gedanken fassen’ (We want to turn religious expression into philosophical thought). Polanyi took religion seriously – not its outer ceremonial trappings but the important truths that lay behind and beneath these beliefs and practices. The sequel was to trace humanity’s progression through three major revelations: the knowledge of death, the discovery of our inner life and conscience, and the realization of freedom amid our social obligations. This was the idea of ‘the reality of society’ around which the whole book was to be built. It was the precursor of our cherished civil freedoms and closely connected with Polanyi’s idea of freedom in a complex society; it is also deeply threatened in an age of state and corporate cyber surveillance.
Keywords: freedom; reality of society; technology

Polanyi’s democratic socialist vision: Piketty through the lens of Polanyi - Somers, Margaret R.; Block, Fred (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
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 conveys the idea that the initial market distribution of income is not natural but is shaped by the systematic exercise of political and economic power.

Fictitious ideas, social facts and the double movement: Polanyi’s framework in the age of neoliberalism - Thomasberger, Claus (Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism, 2020)
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 most important insights, such as his critique of the liberal utopia (in its classical and neoliberal version), his interpretation of the double movement, his vision of the meaning of the industrial revolution, his understanding of the problem of freedom in a complex society and his idea of a necessary ‘reform of human consciousness’. The chapter closes with a discussion of the question of how Polanyi’s categories can be used fruitfully so as to throw light to the post-war era and our society today.
Keywords: Great Transformation, The (Book); double movement; freedom in a complex society; liberal utopia; social facts

Requisitos para el cambio transformativo: contribuciones de Karl Polanyi - Kirby, Peadar (International Review of Economic Policy-Revista Internacional de Política Económica, 2020)
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 ofrecer un marco teórico alternativo para guiar el cambio social transformador en la era del cambio climático. Comienza por identificar una característica clave del equilibrio entre la estructura y la agencia en la sociedad contemporánea, a saber, un optimismo tecnológico y propone un marco alternativo a través de la economía política. La segunda sección identifica los dos marcos teóricos clave que informaron las configuraciones dominantes de la economía política desde la Segunda Guerra Mundial: un marco socialdemócrata y un marco neoliberal. Se argumenta que ahora es necesario un nuevo marco. La tercera y más larga sección dibuja una gama de contribuciones conceptuales de Polanyi para ofrecer una teoría distintivamente diferente a la que ofrece el neoliberalismo. Estos incluyen: sociedad de mercado; diferentes significados de economía; mercancías ficticias; formas de integración; doble movimiento; descubrimiento de la sociedad; la persona humana y la libertad; y el poder de la tecnología. La sección final saca conclusiones.
Keywords: COVID-19; climate change; market society; neoliberalism

Karl Polanyi contre Ludwig von Mises - Pinault, Santiago (Austriaca. Cahiers universitaires dʼinformation sur lʼAutriche, 2020)
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 allait paradoxalement élaborer, sur des catégories conjointes qu’il tire indissociablement de Max Weber et de Carl Menger, un paradigme que nous qualifions de « vieux (ou vétéro)-autrichien » en raison de son retour aux sources de cette tradition (prise au sens large). Le formalisme de Mises s’y intègre pour former une « branche formaliste » selon Polanyi, qui nous a peut-être laissé là sa plus féconde intuition.
Keywords: Austria; MISES, Ludwig von; WEBER, Max, 1864-1920; substantivisme

The Euro as a Polity: Karl Polanyi in Frankfurt? - Thomasberger, Claus (Global Perspectives, 2020)
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 utopian, Mises argued, because only price-making markets for the factors of production provide the information for economically rational decision-making. If the birthplace of neoliberalism was, as Slobodian (2018, p. 30) put it, Ludwig Mises’s office in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, this article was its moment of birth.Karl Polanyi was one of the first to respond, doing so in the same journal in which Mises’s piece had been published, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften, long before Friedrich Hayek, Walter Lippmann, Lionel Robbins, and German ordoliberals such as Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke intervened (Polanyi 2016, 2018b). In his contributions to what became the famous socialist accounting debate, Polanyi outlined his idea of a society’s “constitutional form … as a relationship of mutual recognition” (Polanyi 2018a, 54) based on direct cooperation between consumers and producers, as well as a functional democracy.Two decades later, Polanyi resumed this discourse with a more radical critique, making use of Mises’s argument for his own end (cf. Thomasberger 2020). Mises’s case for price making markets is no less utopian than the central planning model, he argued in The Great Transformation (TGT). The crucial point, Polanyi contended, is that the factors of production are fundamentally different from genuine commodities. Polanyi drew on a line of reasoning put forward by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (2001, p. 81-82) and by Mises’s intimate enemy, the Austrian economist Friedrich Wieser (1927, p. 175-77), who was inclined toward Fabian socialist ideas. Given that the factors of production are not (and cannot be) produced for sale by private enterprises, the commodity form of labor, money, and land is fictitious.Polanyi’s category fictitious commodities is the pivot of Klein’s paper. This starting point allows him to go beyond the common interpretation of Polanyi’s work, which focuses on the dichotomy of market opening and social closure, and to address instead a more profound problem: the conflict between capitalism and democracy. Such a reading is indeed closer to the core of the Polanyi approach, which refers to a society that “transcends the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society” (Polanyi 2001, 242). Not social protection, but democracy, is the alternative to the self-regulation of the market. Polanyi never believed that protection could achieve more than a temporary stabilization of market society. In fact, it is somewhat paradoxical that in the discussion about the contradictions of European integration, Polanyi is celebrated as a defender of societal closure, while he himself expressed the conviction that the protective measures “impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life … and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it” (Polanyi 2001, 4). From the point of view of the conflict between capitalism and democracy, the institutions that result from the attempt to commodify labor, money, and land are crucial because they are, as Klein puts it, the “point of entry of political power into the economic sphere” (Klein 2020, 11). Concerning the debate about the crisis of European integration, this is a rather unexplored terrain.In what follows, I will not discuss the question of whether the category fictitious commodities can be fruitfully linked to the idea of premodern modes of economic integration, a connection that Polanyi himself never established. Instead, I will concentrate on two issues that Klein’s paper raises without discussing them explicitly. The first question is: What if the creation of a self-regulating market system becomes the dominant political goal? What if, for example, the central bank is transformed into a market maker for money on political grounds? The second point seems to me even more important. Europe is not a nation. However, “in Polanyi’s schema, the self-regulating market was a national economic institution” (Polanyi-Levitt 2013, 89), which linked the “rest of the world” to England by a “golden straightjacket,” as Polanyi’s daughter, the development economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, remarked. In TGT even European colonialism plays only a marginal role. As a result, European integration after World War II raises issues that Polanyi did not discuss in depth. I will proceed in two steps: First, I will reconstruct some essential points of Polanyi’s analysis. Following this, I will pose the question of how to apply his analysis to Europe.From the point of view of a market system, the crux of the factors of production—or the fictitious commodities, as I shall hereinafter refer to them—is that, on the one hand, private enterprises must be enabled to buy labor, land, and money on a market. On the other hand, private companies are notcapable of producing and selling the fictitious commodities. The difficulty is obvious: In a market economy, enterprises depend on markets for the fictitious commodities, but such an economy is unable to produce them. This means that the market system depends on external forces. Certainly, this is also true for other institutions and social infrastructures that only the state can provide. However, the fictitious commodities are different in that they cannot be understood as part of the extra-economic framework. Labor, money, and land are economic factors; they are the condition sine qua non of the market system. No self-regulation is conceivable without including the fictitious commodities. What legal scholars with regard to the secular state call the Böckenförde dilemma in the case of fictitious commodities affects economic liberalism directly. The market system is unable to produce and reproduce itself spontaneously. The economic mechanism lives by prerequisites it cannot create. Social institutions are required to provide what for the functioning of a market system is indispensable. Only society can provide the commodities on which a market economy is based. Therefore, in a market society, the economy is not—and can never be—a functional machinery. “Laissez-faire economy was the product of deliberate State action,” as Polanyi (2001, p. 147) stated, summing up the nineteenth-century answer to the dilemma. The different institutions that coordinate economic activities are the outcome not of functional pressure but of a political struggle around the (de)commodification of the fictitious commodities. “Market economies are polities,” to paraphrase the felicitous title of a book edited by Christian Joerges, Bo Stråth, and Peter Wagner (2005).In other words, an ideal market society presupposes the political creation and regulation of particular social institutions whose purpose is to simulate market conditions. Unemployment insurance, health care, union legislation, central bank acts, land property rules, and environmental regulations are indispensable for transforming labor, money, and land into commodity-like entities. Here a conflict between the social nature of the task and its economic role arises. From the perspective of the market system, these institutions fulfill the function of market makers. However, from the viewpoint of society, they allow for various forms of political regulation and economic planning, taking into account the social needs of the different strata of society. It is this tension between their political roots and their economic function within the market system that puts these institutions at the center of the political struggle. Since law cannot ignore prevailing ideals, worldviews, and external expertise, it plays a contradictory role in this process, functioning as a vehicle for commodification and political regulation.In TGT Polanyi showed that from the beginning, law played a key role in the process of commodification. In England, three legal regulations were crucial:Even if a market society presupposes the commodification of all three fictitious commodities, for reasons of space I will concentrate on money. The crucial point is to understand that the nineteenth-century gold standard was primarily not an economic but a political system.In the first decades of the century, substantially inconvertible paper money circulated in England. The commercial banks—and their theoretical advocates, the so-called Currency School—pushed for the right to provide money according to the banks’ calculations. In contrast, the supporters of the Banking School argued that this would lead to the risk of an overissuance of notes. The essential feature of the banking system created by the abovementioned Peel’s Bank Act was to keep the supply of money artificially scarce by linking the amount of banknotes to the quantity of gold in the issuing department of the Bank of England (BoE). By law, political control and the discretionary influence of the government on money and banking were reduced to a minimum.Over the course of the century, the commodification of labor, money, and land in England set in motion a transformation on a global scale. Relying on bank money, the market system generated a previously unknown social and economic dynamic. In the last decades of the “long” nineteenth century, Polanyi (2001, p. 136) commented, “a new way of life spread over the planet with a claim to universality.” The international gold standard gave birth to a worldwide system, in which the constitutional regimes became almost the corollary of the gold standard.Here we can observe in outline two problems that we encounter again in Europe today: (1) Given the legislation that forced central banks to limit the supply of money, the international gold standard not only limited the British government’s room for maneuver, but it confined also, and often even more strictly, the policy space in the other countries. The open market for money and finance created international economic and political interdependencies, which reached deeply into society and undermined democratic aspirations. Social legislation, labor unions, and budgetary and monetary policy were forced to accept the priority of the external monetary stability even if this was in contradiction to national interests. (2) The variety of socioeconomic environments, institutional traditions, and sociopolitical objectives in different countries was negated. The gold standard forced the individual countries to adapt to the liberal economic model with its universal aspirations.The BoE functioned as the conductor of the global monetary orchestra. Polanyi introduced two categories to describe the international dependencies in this period: “anarchistic sovereignty and ‘justified’ intervention in the affairs of other countries” (Polanyi 2001, 261). On the one hand, sovereignty was “anarchistic” insofar as under the gold standard and the prevailing system of unregulated foreign trade, governments lacked any power with respect to international economic affairs. The treatment of trade as a relationship between private undertakings made effective international (political) economic cooperation between states impossible. On the other hand, interventions were “justified” whenever the budgets, finances, and currencies of debtor countries required control. Given the rigidities of the economic system, Polanyi underlined that “the peoples of the world were institutionally standardized to a degree unknown before” (Polanyi 2001, 261).At the same time, however, the inelasticity of the gold supply resulted in a deflationary bias that spread over the world. Even if central banks tried to introduce some doses of flexibility, the system required the adjustment of wages and prices to the current account balances, affecting both the opportunities for profit and the living conditions of large sections of the population. Such a rigid system could survive, Polanyi summarized, only as long as popular democracy was suppressed. Confronted withIn nineteenth-century England, the gold standard and popular democracy were irreconcilable. This explains why attempts to restore the former in the 1920s were bound to fail. Barry Eichengreen took up Polanyi’s point when he pointed out that after the First World War, “the spread of universal suffrage and … the consequent politicization of the policy environment … had destroyed the viability of the gold standard itself” (Polanyi 2001, 233–34). As long as prosperity prevailed, the conflict could be contained. Not so in crisis situations. The restored international gold standard collapsed in 1931.The European Monetary Union (EMU) is at the heart of current debates on the crisis of European integration. Whether Streeck (2014, p. 185) calls the EMU “a political mistake” or Habermas (2012, p. 3) criticizes the “construction flaw of a monetary union,” they share a focus on the Maastricht process. Obviously, this interpretation ignores the fact that the crisis also includes countries—among others the United Kingdom, Poland, and Hungary—that have never been part of the EMU.If we look at the crisis from Polanyi’s perspective, the focus shifts. Not the EMU but the Single European Act, signed in 1986, emerges as the turning point. The single market program was by no means the deregulatory exercise that the European Commission had presented it as being. It was about developing competition throughout the European Union, including markets for labor, land, and money. The novel feature of the program was that it aimed at creating cross-national markets for the fictitious commodities between democratically constituted countries. This is not to say that markets for genuine goods do not cause interdependencies; however, the political character of the process of commodification of the fictitious commodities produces interdependencies of a different quality. Economic, monetary, fiscal, income, and social policy decisions in one country affect directly all other countries participating in the single market. They create political interdependencies, which, if we take Habermas’s understanding that “democratic self-government means that the addressees of mandatory laws are at the same time their authors” (Habermas 2012, 14), is incompatible with national democracy.Why did Jacques Delors and the European Commission nevertheless argue for the creation of Europe-wide markets for the fictitious commodities? Did they underestimate the political costs? Or did they believe that the economic benefits outweighed the loss of political self-determination?It is important to keep in mind that the discussions within the economic discipline never led to the consensus that the European Commission assumed. David Ricardo (1817) had already argued that markets for production factors are by no means necessary in order to enjoy the advantages of the international division of labor. In the twentieth century, declared supporters of free trade such as Gottfried Haberler (1930) and Jagdish Bhagwati (1998) took the same line. Recently, an IMF Staff Paper evaluating empirical studies on the effects of financial globalization concluded that there is evidence not of direct economic gains but rather of political effects: “Our interpretation of the newer literature is that … financial openness can … impose discipline on macroeconomic policies” (Kose et al. 2009, 10). In Europe, the internal market program was met with strong approval by the neoliberal camp. It is reasonable to assume that with the single market, Europe made the political turnaround that the Anglo-Saxon world had already accomplished with Thatcher and Reagan.Be that as it may, the commodification of labor, land, and above all money changed the rules of the game.1 To remain within the context of monetary relations: Open financial markets transformed the European Monetary System (EMS) into an arrangement that came close to what McKinnon (1988) had defined as the “gold standard without gold.” Although the EMS was intended as a symmetrical arrangement, under the conditions of open financial markets the most hard-nosed national central bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank (DBB), assumed the role of a kind of European central bank. The monetary authorities of other European countries were forced to adapt. Recall that in autumn 1992, the conflicts that arose out of these political dependencies nearly put an end to European monetary integration. The different conditions—most European countries were in recession, while Germany was experiencing the unification boom—placed incompatible demands on monetary policy. In this conflict, the DBB acted not as a European but as a German central bank, raising interest rates to record levels. In September 1992, the system faltered. The Italian lira and the pound sterling were forced out of the exchange rate mechanism. Great Britain definitively turned its back on monetary integration, while in Italy a political earthquake shook the party-political landscape.Streeck (2014, p. 186) calls for “a new European monetary system” built on Keynes’s model of fixed but adjustable exchange rates. Now, Keynes was well aware of the fact that systems such as the Bretton Woods System (or the original EMS) are incompatible with transnational financial markets.2 They can function only as long as capital movements are politically controlled. The internal market program destroyed these conditions.Fatally, the Maastricht Treaty did not pursue the goal of reducing political interdependencies but was limited to replacing asymmetry with the all-encompassing dependence on a supranational, technocratic institution that is apparently separate from the political sphere. The German economist Horst Sievert (1993, p. 18) exposed the core idea of the EMU when he remarked, “What is decisive, is that in the monetary union the individual state must pay its debts with money that it cannot produce itself.”3 In the European type of monetary union, not the political authorities but technocrats and private financial institutions control the currency in which public debt is denominated. While in countries with their own currencies the government can turn to its central bank in a time of need, in the EMU, as we have seen in the case of Greece, state bankruptcy becomes a real threat.The financial and economic crisis has revealed the utopian character of the idea of imposing discipline through markets. To touch on just two aspects: (1) Since then, the socioeconomic heterogeneity between the countries has found new forms of expression. By creating long-term interest rate differentials, the crisis has spatially divided what was conceived as a single European capital market. Paradoxically, those countries most dependent on cheap credit are penalized by less favorable financing conditions. (2) If the demand for money and credit is insufficient, efforts to keep the money supply scarce lose their purpose. Neither the Public Sector Purchase Program (PSPP) adopted in 2015 nor the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Program (PEPP) can be derived from theoretical principles based on the commodity fiction of money. The coronavirus crisis is, as Peter Bofinger (2020) suggests, “the hour of Modern Monetary Theory”—an approach that until recently was marginalized by mainstream economics because it regards money not as a commodity but as a means of payment.To overcome the crisis of European integration, two alternatives are usually proposed: deepening integration, “an ever closer union,” or downscaling of integration, defending democracy on the nation-state level. More than seven decades ago, Polanyi already envisaged a third possibility: political cooperation between self-determining nations. Polanyi was in favor of (a) the international division of labor and (b) the liberty of the individual countries “to organize national life at will” (Polanyi 2001, 262). He was (c) aware that both could be achieved only if the commodification of labor, money, and land was restricted. His ideas were indeed aimed at politically controlled regional cooperation between countries that would maintain and develop their particular characteristics. In the final chapter of TGT, he highlighted:The link between the removal of the fictitious commodities from the market and the emergence of a variety of new societies is the crucial point. In another well-known essay published shortly after TGT, Polanyi outlined his idea of a global economic order by contrasting his concept of “regional planning” with that of “universal capitalism” (Polanyi 2018b). For Polanyi, a variety of human societies was not only a fact but also a normative value. It must suffice here to recall his last project, the magazine Co-Existence, which explicitly aimed at the strengthening of peaceful international cooperation.4From this perspective, the debate on the ECB cannot be limited to questions of Outright Monetary Transactions, negative interest rates, state financing, and price stability. The question of how the monetary authorities of a heterogeneous European Union can and should act has to go back to the root problem, the commodification of money. To bring Polanyi’s ideas to Frankfurt would mean at least:However, from the point of view of the commodity fiction, the erosion of the predominance of formal legal rules in the mid-1980s, the emergence of the “regulatory state,” the turn toward governance, and finally the spread of “executive managerialism” (Joerges and Weimer 2013) since the financial crisis appear as a series of functionally necessary adjustments to an originally incomplete regime. As long as this vision prevails, the tensions between increasingly technocratic rule and democratic control are likely to persist. In the light of Europe’s ever-growing diversity, a fundamental redesign of the project, including a reconceptualization of European law that overcomes the fiction of an apolitical integration process, is necessary and, indeed, overdue. Polanyi’s analysis can provide the economic and sociological premises for such an endeavor. However, his writings also show that, especially in the twentieth century, social transformations that would have been necessary proved impossible to implement. We should be prepared; the possibility of some kind of “fundamental shock” to the integration project cannot be ruled out.Claus Thomasberger is a sociologist and economist whose main fields of research are political philosophy, history of economic thought, international political economy, European integration and social ecological transformation. Until 2017, he was Professor of Economics and Foreign Economic Policy at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences. He has been a visiting Professor at the University of Knoxville, the Duke University, and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He is a member of the Board of the Institute for Ecological Economy Research, Berlin, the International Karl Polanyi Society, Vienna, and of the Executive Committee of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, Montreal. Among his publications are: Chronik der großen Transformation, Artikel und Aufsätze von Karl Polanyi 1920-1947 (3 vol.) (with M. Cangiani and K. Polanyi Levitt), 2002-2005; Der neoliberale Marktdiskurs (with W. Ötsch), 2009; Das neoliberale Credo, 2012; Auf der Suche nach dem Ökonomischen (with R. Lucas and R. Pfriem), 2018; Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation (with M. Brie), 2018; Karl Polanyi. Economy and Society. Selected Writings (with M. Cangiani), 2018.

The Contemporary Relevance of Karl Polanyi to Critical Social Enterprise Scholarship - Roy, Michael J.; Grant, Suzanne (Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 2020)
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 society may be manipulated to maintain hegemonic positions. Three of Polanyi’s key concepts are considered and discussed in turn: the ‘substantive economy’, the notion of ‘embeddedness’, and his ‘double movement’ thesis. The contemporary relevance of each concept, and the implications for future research, are presented and discussed, with a view to providing a platform from which to pursue a reinvigorated, emancipatory critical research agenda.
Keywords: Polanyi; Social enterprise; critical research; critical social enterprise scholarship; double movement; economic sociology; embeddedness; social business; social enterprise; social innovation; substantive economy

How to conceptualize an alternative to platform capitalism according to the re-embedding process of K. Polanyi ? [Comment penser l'alternative au capitalisme de plateforme dans une logique de réencastrement polanyien ?] - Aufrère, Laura; Eynaud, Philippe; Maurel, Lionel; Vercher-Chaptal, Corinne (CEPN Working Papers, 2020)
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 experimenting with original methods of scaling up, based on the federation of communities, respectful of their anchoring in the substantive economy. The results make it possible to think of complementarities between different forms of embedding likely to be played out on several scales, and open perspectives for rethinking public policies vis-à-vis the experiments of the solidarity economy and the commons.
Keywords: coopérativisme de plateforme; decommodification; digital platforms; démar- chandisation; plateformes numériques; platform cooperativism; re-embedding; reciprocity; ré-encastrement; réciprocité; substantive economy; économie substantive

Embedding the atom: Pro-neoliberal activism, Polanyi, and sites of acceptance in American uranium communities - Malin, Stephanie A.; Alexis-Martin, Becky (The Extractive Industries and Society, 2020)
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 support industry renewal. Here, we explore the phenomenon of pro-neoliberal activism emerging in communities that identify with uranium markets and that trust in corporate self-regulation, private transparency, and the perceived benefits of potential economic development. Polanyian theory helps us analyze these curious socio-environmental outcomes. While social movements might be ‘progressive,’ ‘regressive,’ or otherwise diverge, Polanyi consistently characterized double movement activists as protecting communities and ecosystems from unstable, self-regulating market systems. But here we see something different and ask: First, how does pro-neoliberal activism contribute to the embedding and institutionalization of neoliberal regimes in uranium mining communities? Second, what structural mechanisms precede and help to facilitate socio-cultural support for free markets and corporate self-regulation, as opposed to support for re-embedding markets in local, public social protections for the US uranium industry?
Keywords: double movement; environmental justice; pro-neoliberal activism; uranium

The surplus approach, Polanyi and institutions in economic anthropology and archaeology - Cesaratto, Sergio; Bucchianico, Stefano Di (Department of Economics University of Siena, 2020)
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 Cedrini & Marchionatti (2017), who dispute the neoclassical “imperialist” attempt to occupy the territory of economic anthropology. The authors rely on the institutionalist background provided by Karl Polanyi and his school and by other anthropologists of similar inspiration. Polanyians, however, fail to complete their institutional analysis by anchoring it to the changing modes of generation and distribution of the economic surplus. Yet their emphasis on the need to introduce institutions from the beginning, when speaking of economic surplus, should be taken into consideration by the classical surplus approach
Keywords: Marx; Polanyi; Sraffa; economic anthropology; economic archaeology; surplus approach

Karl Polanyi and substantivism in economic development - Rodrigues, Waldecy; Santos, Nayara Silva Dos (Brazilian Journal of Political Economy, 2020)
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 institutional variety and complexity of its cultural and social mosaic. True development will only be achieved if it is structured with effective public policies in order to promote this heterogeneity to the maximum possible social welfare.
Keywords: Economic development; Karl Polanyi; plural economy

Permanenter Notstand und der Kampf um gute Sorge(arbeit) – Polanyi’sche Doppelbewegungen in der Marktgesellschaft - Décieux, Fabienne; Becker, Karina; Kutlu, Yalcin (Industrielle Beziehungen, 2020)
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.
Keywords: (Early) Child care; (Klein-)Kinderbetreuung; (Quasi-)Vermarktlichung; (quasi) marketization; D63; Industrial Relations. JEL: B54; Industrielle Beziehungen; J81; Polanyi; Sorgearbeit; care work

On the Nature of the Countermovement: A Response to Stuart et al.’s ‘Climate Change and the Polanyian Countermovement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?’ - Carton, Wim (New Political Economy, 2020)
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. I’m sympathetic to the critique of carbon markets that the authors present, as well as their discussion of degrowth, which mirrors a by now extensive literature demonstrating the pitfalls respectively the necessity of these diametrically opposed approaches to the current socioecological crisis. However, in setting up their case the authors provide an overly optimistic reading of Polanyi that I believe misses a crucial part of his argument, a reading that at least partly explains our differences in opinion. This commentary offers a friendly critique of Stuart et al.’s use of Polanyi and clarifies the argument in my previous text that the authors take issue with.
Keywords: Polanyi; carbon markets; climate change; commodification; countermovement

Polanyi, Callon, and Amazon: Institutionalist, ANT, and DRAN Approaches to Platform Economies - Caliskan, Koray (Sociologica, 2020)
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 critiques static Polanyian perspectives while at the same time building a double tension by a) not being clear whether we observe "the platform economy" as an object or platform economization as a process, and b) not paying sufficient attention to how platforms that draw on intangible materialities move beyond being mere marketization relations. Third, it presents how to address these tensions by drawing on novel theoretical advances of DRAN Approaches and fresh empirical research concerning platform economies, located at the intersection between computer science and social sciences. Proposing a possibility to integrate historical and contemporary studies of economic processes, the essay ends by elaborating on how Grabher & König’s article has a potential to enable a multi-perspective dynamic research strategy in making sense of not only the contemporary working of platforms, but their historical and socio-technical condition of possibility.
Keywords: CALLON, Michel; Platform economy; Polanyi; actor-network theory; platform

Understanding the (Re-)regulation of Private Renting in England: Karl Polanyi, the Rogue Landlord, the Responsible Tenant and the Decent Home - Carr, Helen; Alcock, Rowan (Contract law and the legislature: Autonomy, expectations, and the making of legal doctrine, 2020)

Destructive Automatism in Modern Societies in Karl Polanyi - De Carolis, Massimo (Politica & Società, 2020)
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 structures and the lines of evolution of the whole process. This article argues that the key to such institutional metamorphosis is to be sought in the increasing automatism of modern institutional mechanisms. While such increasing automatism is usually portrayed as technical progress, Polanyi uncovers its ambivalent significance and potential destructiveness for social life.
Keywords: automatism; crisis; institutional mechanism; interregnum

Karl Polanyi and Twenty-first-century Capitalism - Desai, Radhika; Levitt, Kari Polanyi (Manchester University Press, 2020)
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 ideas will shape the twenty-first century. Some clarify, for the meaning of money as a fictitious commodity. Others resolve difficulties in understanding the building blocks of Polanyi's thought: fictitious commodities, the double movement, the United States' exceptional development, the reality of society, and socialism as freedom in a complex society. And yes others explore how Polanyi sheds light on income inequality, world systems theory, comparative political economy.
Keywords: capitalism; double movement; neoliberalism; reality of society; socialism

Ecology, democracy, and COVID-19: Rereading and radicalizing Karl Polanyi - Duzgun, Eren (Ecology, democracy, and COVID-19, 2020)
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.
Keywords: COVID-19

Economía de mercado, globalización y migración: retos y rostros de las personas vulneradas globales. Un análisis desde Karl Polanyi - Franco, Jefferson Frenel Junior Pierrelus (Contextualizaciones Latinoamericanas, 2020)
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 empresas transnacionales e instituciones económicas internacionales.La neo-esclavitud, la miseria, la precariedad y la violencia se han instalado como unmodo de ser y de vivir, aunadas a la emigración, debido a esa explotación, extracciónde recursos naturales a ultranza que lleva a cabo ese modelo económico imperante.Hay voces, manifestaciones, como la de Karl Polanyi, que quieren poner un freno a esemolino satánico, llamado neoliberalismo.
Keywords: economía de mercado; globalización; globalization; market economy; migración; violence; violencia

The Specter of the 1930s in Asian Nation-Building: Global Fascism, Colonial Biopolitics, and the Origins of Modern Asia - Lee, Alex Taek-Gwang (Back to the ‘30s? : Recurring Crises of Capitalism, Liberalism, and Democracy, 2020)
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, arguing that fascism is inseparable from colonial biopolitics by analyzing non-European experiences in the 1930s. East Asia was then a site in which fascism, premised on building a utopian nation-state, played a pivotal role in encouraging people to insist upon political and economic autonomy in order to compete with Europe. The Manchurian Empire (滿州帝國) was an attempt to realize this utopian idea of fascism. Finally, I argue that these fascist experiences remain influential in the region and constitute a mirror image of European modernity.
Keywords: Japanese Fascism and Imperialism; Japanese colonialism; Manchukuo, history and politics; biopolitics of colonialism; fascism; nationalism and nation-building in East Asia

State Formation, Habitus, and National Character: Elias, Bourdieu, Polanyi, and Gellner and the Case of Asylum Seekers in Ireland - Loyal, Steven; Quilley, Stephen (Historical Social Research, 2020)
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 community” involve both the coercive codification and internalization of particular national narratives and origin myths which define “people like us” in terms of a symbolic family; and also, in relation to competing nation-states, the projection and internalization of national group charisma and shame. In Part II, these ideas are applied to the pattern of state formation in Ireland and the recent history of the reception, cultural accommodation, and treatment of asylum seekers.
Keywords: BOURDIEU, Pierre, 1930-2002; ELIAS, Norbert; Ireland; Irishman; Kultur; Sozialpsychologie; Staatenbildung; culture; figuration; habits; habitus; nation; national identity; national stereotype; nationale Identität; nationales Stereotyp; social psychology; state formation

Where are markets? - Peck, Jamie (Market/Place: Exploring Spaces of Exchange, 2020)
The goal of this chapter is to prepare the ground for theorizing the diversity and spatiality of markets, (necessarily) dealing with, but seeking to move concertedly beyond, the restrictive optic of the orthodox model. It seeks to do so by way of three steps. The following section opens up some preliminary questions about the place of markets and their actually existing historical geography. Next, the chapter turns to the challenge of decentring the market, of moving beyond the idea that the market properly and eternally belongs at the centre of the economic universe. What is the scope for understanding “real markets”, both conceptually and empirically, without recourse to the idealized model of the “pure” market, and all its downstream distortions? Finally, the chapter addresses the question of alternative “mappings” of markets, taking some cues from the work of Karl Polanyi, but urging a more thoroughgoing reconstruction. The chapter’s conclusion acknowledges that the “where?” of markets remains a demanding theoretical question, such that what follows serves to inform some different points of departure, not the destination itself. New answers to this “where?” question, though properly a matter for what Polanyi characterizes as the “substantivist” investigation of real-world market formation, re-formation and transformation, ought to recognize, inter alia: first, the relational character of markets, which are codependent on non-market modes of coordination and regulation; second, their “instituted” form, necessary in function but variable in practice; and not least, third, their always out-of-equilibrium processual dynamics and contradictions.
Keywords: markets; space

Introduction : exploring markets - Peck, Jamie; Berndt, Christian; Rantisi, Norma (Market/Place: Exploring Spaces of Exchange, 2020)
The origin of the present volume was an invitational workshop focused on questions of the spatiality and diversity of markets, held at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy in Montreal in the summer of 2017. This was an apt meeting place in a more than literal sense. Although many of those in attendance did not subscribe explicitly to a Polanyian worldview or mode of analysis, most had engaged with Polanyi’s work in different ways. Some had made extensive contributions to neo-Polanyian scholarship, while others were more closely affiliated to radical political economy, performativity approaches or poststructuralism. In this context, more pertinent were a series of broadly aligned sympathies with what might be characterized as Polanyian dispositions, including: shared recognition of the importance of respectful, constructive and non-dogmatic exchange across an interdisciplinary range of heterodox and critical positions; overlapping concerns with the potential of empirically engaged and “substantivist” investigation (to borrow the Polanyian terminology), not just in testing and tweaking extant theories but in the construction of new insights, understandings and socio-political visions; and mutual commitments to humane, emancipatory and sustainable modes of socio-economic and ecological development.
Keywords: Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy; economic geography; markets

The utopian character of the counter-movements : reading Karl Polanyi in the twenty-first century - Rondelez, Pieter (13th Global Studies Conference : Globalization and Social Movements : Familiar Patterns, New Constellations?, 2020)
In the introduction of the 2001 edition of The Great Transformation, Fred Block argues that we all have much to learn from the insights of Karl Polanyi. Relying on Polanyi’s arguments in the Great Transformation is not only useful in order to understand the history of market liberalism, but also for the contemporary debate on globalization and its contestation. The work of Karl Polanyi is inspiring a lot of academics nowadays who are studying the global uprisings since 2008. Some academics – like Block - argue that neoliberals embrace the same utopian visions of their predecessors which lead to counter-movements that are resisting marketization processes and its political and economic consequences. Relying on Polanyi’s work, I point to a danger of interpreting the current neoliberal order as a similar trend towards marketization as in the period that Polanyi is dealing with in his book. Misinterpreting the current marketization project raises questions not only about the feasibility of re-embedding the economy back into society, but also about the desirability of disembedding society from the economy. In concrete, I argue that the utopian character shifted from the marketization project to the counter-movements that are trying to resist and change it. This also raises questions about the role of social scientists in (studying) the process of social change in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: contemporary relevance; countermovement; globalization; marketization; utopia

The Moral Economy of the Capitalist Crowd: Utopianism, the Reality of Society, and the Market as a Morally Instituted Process in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation - Somers, Margaret R. (Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 2020)
In an age of egregious inequality and rising authoritarian, many call for a new “moral economy” and turn to Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation for inspiration. Yet Polanyi’s great insight is that those who cannot reckon with the moral economy of “market justice”—the claim that market outcomes, however unequal, are morally just—fail to understand the power of capitalism. Justified by its original claim to rest on natural science, market justice laid the predicate for democracy as mortal threat. Polanyi reveals market justice as based not on natural law but on predistributive political power, and builds his democratic socialist vision on the “reality of society.”
Keywords: market justice; moral economy

Karl Polanyi - The Life and Works of an Epochal Thinker - Thurnher, Armin; Aulenbacher, Brigitte; Novy, Andreas; Marterbauer, Markus; Polanyi Levitt, Kari (2020)
On 8 May 2018, the International Karl Polanyi Society was founded in Vienna. This marked the beginning of a new phase of engagement with a thinker who had already come to be regarded as a centennial figure in the Anglo-Saxon world. This book serves as an introduction to The Great Transformation, Polanyi’s magnum opus and one of the most important works of the 20th century. It helps us to understand the background to Karl Polanyi’s intellectual career, sketches the lives of his family members, describes the milieus of Budapest, Vienna, London and New York, which were such informative influences in his life, and sheds light on his relationship with contemporaries such as Keynes, Mises and Hayek. Renowned Polanyi researchers, including, most notably his daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt, elucidate Polanyian concepts such as ‘fictitious commodities’ and apply his analysis to an era when everything seems to be subjected to the mechanics of the market.
Keywords: Great Transformation, The (Book); fictitious commodities

Economy–society tensions in the Eurozone: the "anti-democratic virus" revived - Markantonatou, Maria (Capitalism in Transformation, 2019)
This chapter draws on Polanyi’s analysis of the economy-democracy tension to discuss today’s crisis in Greece and the Eurozone. First, some of the economic and social effects of the Greek austerity programme are discussed with reference to his observations on liberal international interventionism in the interwar period. Secondly, the chapter looks at the ways in which democratic outcomes (elections, referenda, parliamentarian decisions, etc.) in Greece and elsewhere were, during different crisis episodes following 2010, put aside in favour of market discipline and austerity doctrines. It is argued that Polanyi’s thesis on the “mutual incompatibility” between capitalism and democracy (the core of what he termed the “anti-democratic virus”) is crucial for understanding today’s crisis and crisis management in the framework of Eurozone’s liberalism.
Keywords: Eurozone crisis; Greece; fascist virus

Karl Polanyi and the Global Network Inspired by His Work - Mendell, Marguerite; Aulenbacher, Brigitte; Novy, Andreas (Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 2019)

Economics as Social Science: Economics imperialism and the challenge of interdisciplinarity - Marchionatti, Roberto; Cedrini, Mario (Taylor & Francis, 2016)
There is a growing consensus in social sciences that there is a need for interdisciplinary research on the complexity of human behavior. At an age of crisis for both the economy and economic theory, economics is called upon to fruitfully cooperate with contiguous social disciplines. The term ‘economics imperialism’ refers to the expansion of economics to territories that lie outside the traditional domain of the discipline. Its critics argue that in starting with the assumption of maximizing behaviour, economics excludes the nuances of rival disciplines and has problems in interpreting real-world phenomena. This book focuses on a territory that persists to be largely intractable using the postulates of economics: that of primitive societies. In retracing the origins of economics imperialism back to the birth of the discipline, this volume argues that it offers a reductionist interpretation that is poor in interpretative power. By engaging with the neglected traditions of sociological and anthropological studies, the analysis offers suggestions for a more democratic cooperation between the social sciences. Economics as Social Science is of great interest to those who study history of economic thought, political economy and the history of economic anthropology, as well as history of social sciences and economic methodology.
Keywords: economic theory; economics imperialism

Cucumbers and Courgettes: Rural Workfare and the New Double Movement in Hungary - Hann, Chris (Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2016)
The paper is an application of the economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi to contemporary rural Hungary. After addressing the influence of Polanyi’s critique of market society and his standing in the discipline of anthropology, the main focus is the community of Tázlár on the Danube-Tisza interfluve. The paper traces the history of the ‘fictitious commodities’ of land and labour in this relatively isolated settlement, which was not fully integrated into the national society until the socialist era. The innovative symbiosis of household and cooperative farming was destroyed in the 1990s. In the depressed economic climate of today, workfare schemes are popular because they treat villagers as human beings rather than as commodities to be exploited for maximum profit. The workfare initiatives of populist power holders can be interpreted as one facet of a complex ‘double movement’ in which postsocialist society seeks to defend itself against the domination of the market.
Keywords: (post)socialism; Danube-Tisza interfluve; Hungary; Karl Polanyi; double movement; fictitious commodities; neoliberalism; workfare

Embeddedness, Redistribution and Double Dependence: Polányi-reception Reconsidered - Lengyel, György (Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2016)
This article – a modified version of a lecture – is a contribution to the reception of Polányi in the West and the East, more precisely, to the inquiry about what impact Polányi’s views have had on American and Hungarian economic sociology, which are the contact points between the two, and what research perspectives they offer. It concentrates on the perception of embeddedness and redistribution, not touching on other views unless they are conducive to the comprehension of certain connections. Polányi’s oeuvre is so rich and it has inspired such a wide range of debates that a conclusive review is impossible within a single article. It is hoped however that the polemic on the concept of embeddedness may be illuminating and also the aftermath of the forms of integration, particularly redistribution, important. The concept of double dependence is touched upon as well, for it grasps an essential feature of the post-socialist Eastern European economies. It is worth mentioning it in this context, for Polányi’s influence left its mark upon it and it is also related to the conceptual apparatus of the substantive view.
Keywords: Polányi; dependent market economy; double dependenc; embeddedness; fictitious commodities; forms of integration; post-socialist transformation; redistribution; state socialism; varieties of capitalism

Sustaining Democracy in an Era of Free Markets: Karl Polanyi’s Perspectives on the Politics of Finance - Scheiring, Gábor (Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics, 2016)
With the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of illiberalism in the aftermath of the global financial crisis we need a theoretical framework that links modernization, crises and the fate of democracy. In my paper I attempt to show that Polanyi’s thinking represents such a framework. I focus on Polanyi’s historically informed political economic analysis of the tensions between liberal finance and liberal democracy. In the first section I reconstruct Polanyi’s political stance regarding democracy, socialism and the market. Based on this I will bring to the fore his often neglected views regarding the commodification of money and the tensions between international finance and democracy. Polanyi shows that monetary policy is not a technical but a deeply political question with major social implications. In the final section of my paper I conclude that Polanyi’s theory of the double movement and fictitious commodification can only be understood once we strip it of its excessive functionalism and bring it into dialogue with his political views. Polanyi urges to preserve the market by protecting the economy and society from the damages of excessive commodification: markets need to be protected from themselves.
Keywords: Polanyi; democracy; double movement; fictitious commodities; finance

An Evaluation of Institutional Matrices Theory Which Was Designed to Illustrate Differences Between Russian and Western Political Economies - Hayden, F. Gregory (Journal of Economic Issues (Taylor & Francis Ltd), 2017)
This article is devoted to the evaluation of the institutional matrices theory (IMT), which was designed to illustrate the differences between Russian and Western political economic systems. IMT has no matrix, and it is an ideological declaration rather than a theory. It is a set of assertions and assumptions that are adopted without evidence, and then hypostatized to be Russian and Western socioeconomic systems. IMT literature claims to utilize the reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange model of Karl Polanyi (1944, 1957). However, IMT suffers from a number of assumptive and methodological problems in its application, the first of which consists of the complete exclusion of reciprocity from consideration. The first section of the article is an explanation of problems with IMT, and the second section demonstrates some particulars of the IMT problems with a real-world social fabric matrix from a Western nation.
Keywords: Russia; economic policy; economics; institutional economics; institutional matrices theory; social fabric matrix; socioeconomics

Risk Markets and the Landscape of Social Change - Breger Bush, Sasha (International Journal of Political Economy, 2016)
With the critical derivatives and financialization literatures as background, I argue in this essay that risk markets (i.e., derivatives and insurance markets) play an integral role in insulating global neoliberalism from popular and elite demands for reform, as well as from the related imposition of new forms of government intervention. Inspired by Polanyi’s “double movement” and Bryan and Rafferty’s (2006) notion of “blending” in derivatives markets, the argument rests upon the insight that risk markets transform social risk into individual cost, resulting in potentially large but subtle implications for global prospects for social change. After providing a taxonomy of risk instruments that emphasizes their growing role in managing important social risks, I describe and provide brief case studies of two pathways through which risk markets help to protect the neoliberal order from political threats. The first involves the political positioning of insurance and derivatives instruments and markets as “solutions” to global social problems. The second involves the manner in which insurance and derivatives products generate “political moral hazards” that discourage support for new kinds of global policies and structures. As such, this essay contributes to the growing body of critical political economy literature on financialization, financial innovation, and derivatives and insurance markets.
Keywords: Polanyi; derivative securities; derivatives; finance; financialization; innovation; insurance; insurance exchanges; neoliberalism; social change

'Freedom in a Complex Society': The Relevance of Karl Polanyi's Political Philosophy in the Neoliberal Age - Cangiani, Michele (International Journal of Political Economy, 2012)
Karl Polanyi's demanding vision of freedom and democracy seems far from the reality of our times and current ideologies. However, a deeper analysis reveals the ability of his political philosophy not only to find a solution of the paradox of liberty in spite of social constraints, indeed through social institutions, but also to answer the most important practical question with which we are confronted: that of improving, as Polanyi says, "our chances of survival." The conception synthetically expounded in the last pages of The Great Transformation can be better clarified through some of Polanyi's recently published manuscripts of the interwar period. A reference is also to be made to Karl Marx in the first place but also to other more recent authors.
Keywords: capitalist systems; elections; freedom in a complex society; history of economic thought; legislatures; lobbying; political philosophy; political processes; rent-seeking; voting behavior

The Belief in Economic Determinism, Neoliberalism, and the Significance of Polanyi's Contribution in the Twenty-First Century - Thomasberger, Claus (International Journal of Political Economy, 2012)
How can we explain why Karl Polanyi's book The Great Transformation is more relevant today than ever before? The central thesis of the paper is that Polanyi's analysis is groundbreaking because it goes far beyond the interpretation of the civilization of the nineteenth century. By focusing on the "belief of economic determinism," Polanyi challenges the juxtaposition of being and thinking, of material life-process and consciousness. He rejects the assumption that society encompasses a world of objective facts independent of theoretical beliefs and visions. Polanyi's work is of utmost importance today because by anticipating a change in approach such as the liberal authors made, from the opposite point of view, during the interwar period, he offers the key not only to the analysis of the market mechanism, but also to a critical understanding of neoliberalism.
Keywords: Austrian school; Austrian school of economics; Great Transformation, The (Book); Keynesian economics; Marxist philosophy; POLANYI, Karl, 1886-1964; belief & doubt - social aspects; central economic planning - social aspects; double movement; economic determinism; economic history - 19th century; economic planning; economic theory; fictitious commodities; free enterprise - social aspects; history of economics - 20th century; human behavior - economic aspects; laissez-faire; neoliberalism; neoliberalism - social aspects; self-fulfilling prophecy; socioeconomics; utopias - economic aspects

'Planning for Freedom': Hayekian and Polanyian Policies in Latin America - Valderrama, Paula (International Journal of Political Economy, 2012)
In the first part of the paper, the concepts of "planning for freedom" by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi are compared. Hayek rejects "central planning" and also all kinds of "planning for specific aims," but he defends the principle of "planning for competition" as the main condition of a free society. This principle includes the provision of a pertinent institutional framework and state intervention to create markets in spheres of society previously ruled by nonmarket principles. Polanyi agrees that "planning" is necessary in order to achieve freedom in a complex society, but he criticizes the liberal understanding of freedom as a vain "illusion" and considers the principle of "planning for competition" a political ideal that endangers the cohesion of societies. The starting point of Polanyi's argumentation is Karl Marx's theory of reification, but he goes beyond this, complementing it with the concept of "social freedom" based on knowledge and responsibility. Considering the Latin American experience in recent decades, the paper compares Hayekian and Polanyian concepts of "planning for freedom" in their real political and social dimensions.
Keywords: HAYEK, Friedrich A. von (Friedrich August), 1899-1992; Latin America; capitalist systems: planning, coordination, and reform; formal and informal sectors; freedom; history of economic thought: individuals; institutional arrangements; planning models; planning policy; political processes: rent-seeking, lobbying, elections, legislatures, and voting behavior; shadow economy