Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract

Seventy-five years ago, in April 1944, Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation-On the origins of our times (TGT) was published in the United States and England. Since then it has been translated into 15 languages (cf. Polanyi Levitt in this volume). Written in America during the war and under the impact of the Great Depression, TGT sought to come to terms with the collapse of the liberal civilization in a similarly embracing manner as Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialectics of enlightenment, published as a preliminary version also in 1944 in the USA. TGT captures the specific historical constellation of the "revolutionary thirties" in which free trade, the gold standard, and liberal democracy reached an impasse, resulting in competing attempts to reorder society-attempts that ranged from socialism to fascism and from Stalin's "socialism in one country" to Roosevelt's New Deal. At that time, the repercussions of Polanyi's work remained fairly restricted, John Dewey's euphoric feedback being a notable exception (cf. Gräser in this volume).

Assessing Regional Variation in Support for the Radical Right-Wing Party ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD)—A Novel Application of Institutional Anomie Theory across German Districts

“…It is a specific setting in which Karl Polanyi's work is rediscovered, tracing the development of financialized capitalism since the 1990s, the deepening of neoliberal reforms, the 2008 financial crisis, and the austerity policies that followed (Atzmüller and Décieux 2020). Rosenfeld (2000, 2001), along with many others, including a report by the German government (WBGU 2011), have revisited Karl Polanyi's ideas, claiming a "new Polanyian 'movement' of market expansion" (Atzmüller and Décieux 2020, p. 2) in contemporary Western societies (for an overview, see Aulenbacher et al 2019; relevant to the present study, e.g., Atzmüller and Décieux 2020;Dörre 2019;Fraser 2011Fraser , 2017Lim 2021;Sandbrook 2018).…”

“…When scholars in the field of critical political economy (Aulenbacher et al 2019;Wigger 2022) refer to Polanyi to gain insight into how contemporary radical right movements emerge in the context of free market capitalism, they often turn to his concept of a 'double movement' (Dörre 2019;Fraser 2011Fraser , 2017Holmes 2018;Lim 2021). Polanyi's (Polanyi [1944(Polanyi [ ] 2001 double-movement refers to the dialectical counterbalance between the two forces that have continually shaped the history of capitalist development: economic liberalism, which attempts to extend free markets and free trade, and social protectionism, which aims to safeguard people and the society from the destabilizing forces of the former.…”

“…In revisiting Polanyi's ideas, in the last five decades, researchers have observed parallel changes to what Polanyi described for the 19th and 20th century (Aulenbacher et al 2019). After long periods of 're-embedding ' and decommodification (Esping-Andersen 1990), the recent movement of market expansion and the financialization of capitalism has led to the 'fragmentation and polarization of welfare systems and social policies' (Atzmüller and Décieux 2020, p. 7).…”

The Power of Kajang Indigenous People from Covid-19

“…Kiwari, when all the world economic activities are directed to accumulation of capital through the trading practice of capitalism style, the Kajang people perform an economic action that is motivated by the community needs. This is an economic practice that is called by Polanyi [22] a substantive economy, which is an economic activity that relies entirely on nature and each other. Besides subsistence, the Kajang indigenous people are an autonomous community.…”

Re-embedding embeddedness: what is the role of social enterprise in promoting democracy and protecting social rights?

“…an economy which is instituted in line with the broader needs and demands of society. Drawing illustrations and examples from the UK, which is recognised as having the most developed institutional environment for social enterprise in the world (see Nicholls, 2010;Teasdale, 2012), our arguments are undertaken in a tradition of utopian thinking exemplified by Polanyi (Aulenbacher et al, 2019;Novy, 2017;Wright, 2012). We consider that such work is needed to balance recent critiques of social enterprise as merely an 'embodiment' of neoliberal reason, or even as a form of 'neoliberal social movement' (Spicer et al, 2019).…”