Discussing Karl Polanyi, Understanding the Current Crisis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review of "The Power of Market Fundamentalism" by Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers
Voegelin View, 2015
Karl Polanyi is not an easy man to pigeonhole. He is best known as thinker behind "The Great Transformation", and the hand which penned that story of transformation drew more vivid portraits of those he would vex and calumny than those whom he held closest to his heart's mind. His book, we are told by the authors of "The Power of Market Fundamentalism" (hereafter TPMF), was privately praised in letters by his brother, Michael Polanyi (a very notable and systematic critic of Marx and of positivism), yet was widely ignored by the dominant ideological factions of the Cold War. Only much later, was his work to be rediscovered and adopted in North America, more especially by parties and partisans of the left. Like such contemporary economic thinkers as E.F. Schumacher, Polanyi shares the nearly unique mark of a man whose core insights should, technically, brand him as an heretic among all the established faiths and creeds of the age. Only, in fact, he has been granted a certain beatification.
Review of: Karl Polanyi A Life on the Left, by Gareth Dale. 2016, Columbia University Press
In Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left , Gareth Dale continues his longstanding intellectual engagement with one of the twentieth-century's leading theorists of the market economy in a biography that traces the development of Polanyi's thought against the backdrop of his life. While the book may not fully grapple with the contradictions that emerge within the account, Chris Moreh praises this laudable and definitive work that is likely to inspire a new generation of activist scholars through its exploration of Polanyi's life and times.
Toward a Postcritical Economics: Comment on Michael Polanyi's "What to Believe"
Tradition & Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical, 2020
"What to Believe" is an important, short Polanyi piece that illuminates fiduciary and postcritical elements permeating various parts of his scholarship. This paper explores how Polanyi's message about understanding, believing, and belonging developed in "What to Believe" fits into Polanyi's economic liberalism. It discusses its relevance for his views about agents, markets, and the desirable methods of inquiry into the economy, and ends with reflections on the seeds of this new perspective in his earlier economics film project and its influence on Polanyi's concept of economics.
Re-reading Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi in the Late-Modern Condition of Fragility
Political Studies Review, 2017
The cardinal role of complexity in Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the market has hardly gone unnoticed. Indeed, there is now a considerable corpus of literature that has established the importance of spontaneity as a central concept around which neoliberal economic theory revolves. However, as William Connolly analyzes, its closed conception of economic processes simplifies real economic volatilities and ignores both modes of self-organization and creativity found in democracy and social movements that periodically irrupt into market processes. This article builds upon this critique of neoliberalism and employs Karl Polanyi’s genealogy of modern capitalism to understand historical imbrications between the market and the social and their contribution to the fragility of capitalism. Polanyi’s notions of “(dis-)embeddedness” and the “double movement” not only show us a more “complex” view of modern political economy but also provide us with important lessons for political responses to the recent crisis of neoliberal capitalism.
Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy, 2013
in his intriguing short book, Economics After the Crisis, based on his 2010 Lionel Robbins memorial lectures at the LSE, comes to bury the curiously undying ideology of market fundamentalism that has had such a profound presence in our recent history. Turner, a technocratic insider with a curriculum vitae that includes stints as a director at McKinsey, as an economist at Chase Manhattan, and as Director-General of the CBI, before his most recent incarnation as Chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) until its abolition by the Coalition government earlier this year, sets himself up as an anti-neo-liberal Van Helsing, determined to hunt down, and then put down, the vampyric conventional wisdom in economics and fi nance. Specifi cally, Turner takes aim at these three central claims: