Karl Polanyi - Wikipedia

Karl Polanyi - Wikipedia

Karl Polanyi

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The native form of this personal name is Polányi Károly. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Karl Polanyi
Polanyi, c. 1918
Born	25 October 1886 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	23 April 1964 (aged 77) Pickering, Ontario, Canada
Spouse	Ilona Duczynska   ​ (m. 1923)​
Children	Kari Polanyi Levitt
Relatives	Michael Polanyi (brother) John Polanyi (nephew) Eva Zeisel (niece)
Academic background
Influences	Robert Owen, Bronisław Malinowski, G. D. H. Cole, Richard Tawney, Richard Thurnwald, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Karl Bücher, Heinrich Schurtz, Ferdinand Tönnies, Adam Smith, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, György Lukács, Carl Menger
Academic work
Discipline	Economic sociology, economic history, economic anthropology, Philosophy
School or tradition	Historical school of economics
Notable ideas	Embeddedness, Double Movement, fictitious commodities, economistic fallacy, the formalist–substantivist debate (substantivism)
Influenced	Fred L. Block, Margaret Somers, Kari Polanyi Levitt

Part of a series on
Economic, applied, and development anthropology
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Karl Paul Polanyi (/poʊˈlænji/; Hungarian: Polányi Károly [ˈpolaːɲi ˈkaːroj]; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964)^[1] was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic sociologist, and politician,^[2] best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.^[3]

In his writings, Polanyi advances the concept of the Double Movement, which refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. He argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered best as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics, which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This opinion is counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science.

Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned.^[4] Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement.

Polanyi was active in politics, and helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party [hu] in 1914, serving as its secretary. He fled Hungary for Vienna in 1919 when the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy seized power. He fled Vienna for London in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and fascism was ascendant in Austria. After years of unsuccessfully seeking employment at universities in the United Kingdom, he moved to the United States in 1940 where he joined the faculty at Bennington College and later taught at Columbia University.

Early life

Karl Polanyi was born in Vienna and raised in Budapest by a German‑speaking Jewish family assimilating into the secular middle class.^[5][6] His younger brother was Michael Polanyi, a philosopher, and his niece was Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist.^[7] He was born in Vienna, at the time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.^{[8][page needed]} His father, Mihály Pollacsek, was a railway entrepreneur. Mihály never changed the name Pollacsek, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. Mihály died in January 1905, which was an emotional shock to Karl, and he commemorated the anniversary of Mihály's death throughout his life.^[9] Karl and Michael Polanyi's mother was Cecília Wohl. The name change to Polanyi was made by Karl and his siblings.

Polanyi was well educated despite the ups and downs of his father's fortune, and he immersed himself in Budapest's active intellectual and artistic scene. Polanyi studied at the Minta Gymnasium.^[10]

Early career

Polanyi founded the radical and influential Galileo Circle while at the University of Budapest, a club which would have far reaching effects on Hungarian intellectual thought. During this time, he was actively engaged with other notable thinkers, such as György Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, and Karl Mannheim. Polanyi graduated from Budapest University in 1912 with a doctorate in Law. In 1914, he helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party of Hungary and served as its secretary.^{[citation needed]}

Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, in active service at the Russian Front and hospitalized in Budapest. Polanyi supported the republican government of Mihály Károlyi and its Social Democratic regime. The republic was short-lived, with socialist Béla Kun toppling the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Polanyi left Hungary for Vienna in order to undergo medical treatment. During this time, the Kun government was replaced by the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy.^[11] As a consequence, Polanyi left Hungary permanently.^[6][11]

In Vienna

From 1924 to 1933, he was employed as a senior editor of the prestigious Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist) magazine. It was at this time that he first began criticizing the Austrian school of economics, which he felt created abstract models that lost sight of the organic, interrelated reality of economic processes. Polanyi himself was attracted to Fabianism and the works of G. D. H. Cole. It was also during this period that Polanyi first developed an interest in Christian socialism.

Polanyi married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska, who was of Polish-Hungarian background. Their daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt carried on the family tradition of academic economic research.

In London

Polanyi was asked to resign from Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria. He left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936. His lecture notes contained the research for what later became The Great Transformation. However, he would not start writing this work until 1940, when he moved to Vermont to take up a position at Bennington College. Polanyi had for many years sought employment at British universities but was unsuccessful.^[6] The book was published in 1944, to great acclaim.^[12] In it, Polanyi described the enclosure process in England and the creation of the contemporary economic system at the beginning of the 19th century.^{[citation needed]}

United States and Canada

Polanyi joined the staff of Bennington College in 1940, teaching a series of five timely lectures on the "Present Age of Transformation".^[13][14] The lectures "The Passing of the 19th Century",^[15] "The Trend Towards an Integrated Society",^[16] "The Breakdown of the International System",^[17] "Is America an Exception?",^[18] and "Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution"^[19] took place during the early stages of World War II. Polanyi participated in Bennington's Humanism Lecture Series (1941)^[20] and Bennington College's Lecture Series (1943) where his topic was "Jean Jacques Rousseau: Or Is a Free Society Possible?"^[21]

After the war, Polanyi received a teaching position at Columbia University (1947–1953). However, his wife, Ilona Duczyńska (1897–1978), had a background as a former communist, which made gaining an entrance visa in the United States impossible. As a result, they moved to Canada, and Polanyi commuted to New York City. In the early 1950s, Polanyi received a large grant from the Ford Foundation to study the economic systems of ancient empires.

Having described the emergence of the modern economic system, Polanyi now sought to understand how "the economy" emerged as a distinct sphere in the distant past. His seminar at Columbia drew several famous scholars and influenced a generation of teachers, resulting in the 1957 volume Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Polanyi continued to write in his later years and established a new journal entitled Coexistence. In Canada he lived in Pickering, Ontario, where he died in 1964.

Selected works

• Dalton, George, ed. Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968); collected essays and selections from his work.
• Pearson, Harry W., ed. The Livelihood of Man (Academic Press, 1977)
• Polanyi, Karl. 'The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Insights of Our Time.' (Boston: Beacon Press. 1944) ISBN 0-8070-5679-0
• Polanyi, Karl, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Person, eds. Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957)
• Polanyi, Karl. Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, (1966).
• Polanyi, Karl. For a New West: Essays, 1919–1958 (Polity Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0745684444

Articles by Karl Polanyi

• "Socialist Accounting" (1922)
• "The Essence of Fascism" (1933–1934); article^[22]
• "Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning?", The London Quarterly of World Affairs, vol. 10 (3) (1945)

See also

• Michael Polanyi (brother)
• John Polanyi (nephew)
• Eva Zeisel (cousin)

Notes

1.  Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2003) vol 9. p. 554
2.  "Karl Polanyi | Hungarian politician | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 3 August 2022.
3.  "Karl Polanyi". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 26 July 2021.
4.  Silver 2007.
5.  Dale 2016a, pp. 11, 17–18.
6.  Ferguson, Donna (23 June 2024). "'The greatest thinker you've never heard of': expert who explained Hitler's rise is finally in the spotlight". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712.
7.  Harrod 2012.
8.  Dale 2016a.
9.  Dale 2016a, p. 13.
10.  Adelman, Jeremy (2017). "Polanyi, the Failed Prophet of Moral Economics". Boston Review.
11.  "The Elusive Karl Polanyi". Dissent Magazine. 2017.
12.  Melegh, Attila; Szelényi, Iván (2016). "Polanyi Revisited. Introduction". Intersections. EEJSP. 2 (2): 4–10. doi:10.17356/IEEJSP.V2I2.246.
13.  Polanyi, Karl (1940). Karl Polanyi: Five Lectures on The Present Age of Transformation-Lecture Series Listing of Topics (Speech). Five Lectures on The Present Age of Transformation. Bennington College: Bennington College. hdl:11209/8502.
14.  Leigh, Robert D. (25 September 1940), "Letter from President Robert Devore Leigh to Peter Drucker", Letter, Bennington College, hdl:11209/5449
15.  Polanyi, Karl (1940). The Passing of 19th Century Civilization (Lecture #1 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8514.
16.  Polanyi, Karl (1940). The Trend Towards an Integrated Society (Lecture #2 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8515.
17.  Polanyi, Karl (1940). The Breakdown of the International System (Lecture #3 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8516.
18.  Polanyi, Karl (1940). Is America an Exception? (Lecture #4 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8517.
19.  Polanyi, Karl (1940). Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8518.
20.  Boas, George; Fergusson, Francis; Patterson, Margaret; Chapman, Dwight; Hardman, Yvette; Kouwenhoven, John; Luening, Otto; Polanyi, Karl; Stein, Peg; Truman, David; Smith, Bradford; Whittinghill, Maurice (April 1941), Bennington College Humanism-Lecture Series Listing of Speakers and Topics, Bennington College, hdl:11209/8501
21.  Polanyi, Karl; Fergusson, Francis; Mendershausen, Horst; d'Estournelles, Paul; Drucker, Peter F.; Hanks, Lucien; Forbes, John D. (1943), Bennington College Lecture Series, 1943 – Lecture Series Listing of Speakers and Topics, Bennington College, hdl:11209/8499
22.  Polanyi, Karl (1935). Lewis, John; Polanyi, Karl; Kitchin, Donald K. (eds.). "The Essence of Fascism". Christianity and the Social Revolution. London: Victor Gollancz Limited. pp. 359–394.

References

Library resources about
Karl Polanyi

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• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

By Karl Polanyi

• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Block, Fred (2008). "Polanyi's Double Movement and the Reconstruction of Critical Theory". Revue Interventions économiques [En ligne]. 38 (38). doi:10.4000/interventionseconomiques.274.
• Dale, Gareth (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, Polity, ISBN 978-0-7456-4072-3
• Dale, Gareth (2016), Reconstructing Karl Polanyi, Pluto Press, ISBN 978-0745335186
• Dale, Gareth (2016a). Karl Polanyi : a life on the left. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-17608-8. OCLC 948826672.
• Dale, Gareth (2016b), Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings
• Harrod, Tanya (15 January 2012). "Eva Zeisel obituary". The Guardian.
• Humphries, S. C. (1969). "History, Economics, and Anthropology: The Works of Karl Polanyi". History and Theory. 8 (2): 165–212.
• Humphries, S. C., Vol. 8, No. 2, 1969, 165-212.
• McRobbie, Kenneth, ed. (1994), Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 1-895431-84-0
• McRobbie, Kenneth; Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, eds. (2000), Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 1-55164-142-9
• Mendell, Marguerite; Salée, Daniel (1991), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, St. Martins Press, ISBN 0-312-04783-5
• Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, ed. (1990), The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 0-921689-80-2
• Silver, Morris (2007). "Redistribution and Markets in the Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: Updating Polanyi". Antiguo Oriente. 5: 89–112.
• Stanfield, J. Ron (1986), The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi: Lives and Livelihood, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-333-39629-4

Further reading

• Adaman, Fikret, Pat Devine, eds. Economy and Society: Money, Capitalism and Transition. Black Rose Books, 2002. Additional subtitle: reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange: embedding the economy in society. Essays based on the legacy of Karl Polanyi.
• Aulenbacher, Brigitte, et al. (ed.), Karl Polanyi, the life and works of an epochal thinker. Falter Verlag, 2020.
• Block, Fred and Somers, Margaret, The Power of Market Fundamentalism : Karl Polanyi's Critique. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Brie, Michael (ed.), Karl Polanyi in dialogue : a socialist thinker for our times, Montreal : Black Rose Books, 2017.
• Brie, Michael and Thomasberger, Claus, Karl Polanyi's vision of a socialist transformation. Montreal : Black Rose Books, 2018.
• Dale, Gareth, Karl Polanyi : a life on the left, New York : Columbia University Press, 2016.
• Dale, Gareth, et al. (ed.), Karl Polanyi's political and economic thought : a critical guide. Newcastle upon Tyne : Agenda Publishing, 2019.
• Dale, Gareth, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi : excavation and critique, London, England : Pluto Press, 2016.
• Desai, Radhika and Polanyi Levitt, Kari, Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2021.
• Hann, Chris, Repatriating Karl Polanyi Market Society in the Visegrád States. Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2019.
• Kuttner, Robert, "The Man from Red Vienna" (review of Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, Columbia University Press, 381 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 55–57. "In sum, Polanyi got some details wrong, but he got the big picture right. Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism." (Robert Kuttner, p. 57.)

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Karl Polanyi.

• Karl Polanyi Digital Archive
• The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy – The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University web site.
• Karl Polanyi Wiki
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944) Review Essay by Anne Mayhew, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee
• Profile on Karl Polanyi – On the History of Economic Thought Website
• The free market is an impossible utopia (2014-07-18), The Washington Post. A conversation with Fred Block and Margaret Somers on their book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard University Press, 2014). The book argues that the ideas of Karl Polanyi are crucial to help understand economic recessions and their aftermath.
• [1] – Why Two Karls Are Better Than One: Integrating Polyani and Marx in a Critical Theory of the Current Crisis by Nancy Fraser
• Ferguson, Donna (23 June 2024). "'The greatest thinker you've never heard of': expert who explained Hitler's rise is finally in the spotlight". the Guardian. Retrieved 23 June 2024.
• Works by or about Karl Polanyi at the Internet Archive

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The native form of this personal name is Polányi Károly. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.

Karl Polanyi

Polanyi, c. 1918

Born 25 October 1886

Vienna, Austria-Hungary

Died 23 April 1964 (aged 77)

Pickering, Ontario, Canada

Spouse Ilona Duczynska ​(m. 1923)​

Children Kari Polanyi Levitt

Relatives

Michael Polanyi (brother)

John Polanyi (nephew)

Eva Zeisel (niece)

Academic background

Influences Robert Owen, Bronisław Malinowski, G. D. H. Cole, Richard Tawney, Richard Thurnwald, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Karl Bücher, Heinrich Schurtz, Ferdinand Tönnies, Adam Smith, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, György Lukács, Carl Menger

Academic work

Discipline Economic sociology, economic history, economic anthropology, Philosophy

School or tradition Historical school of economics

Notable ideas Embeddedness, Double Movement, fictitious commodities, economistic fallacy, the formalist–substantivist debate (substantivism)

Influenced Fred L. Block, Margaret Somers, Kari Polanyi Levitt

Part of a series on

Economic, applied, and development

anthropology

Basic concepts

Provisioning systems

Case studies

Related articles

Major theorists

Social and cultural anthropology

vte

Karl Paul Polanyi (/poʊˈlænji/; Hungarian: Polányi Károly [ˈpolaːɲi ˈkaːroj]; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964)[1] was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic sociologist, and politician,[2] best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.[3]

In his writings, Polanyi advances the concept of the Double Movement, which refers to the dialectical process of marketization and push for social protection against that marketization. He argues that market-based societies in modern Europe were not inevitable but historically contingent. Polanyi is remembered best as the originator of substantivism, a cultural version of economics, which emphasizes the way economies are embedded in society and culture. This opinion is counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science.

Polanyi's approach to the ancient economies has been applied to a variety of cases, such as Pre-Columbian America and ancient Mesopotamia, although its utility to the study of ancient societies in general has been questioned.[4] Polanyi's The Great Transformation became a model for historical sociology. His theories eventually became the foundation for the economic democracy movement.

Polanyi was active in politics, and helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party [hu] in 1914, serving as its secretary. He fled Hungary for Vienna in 1919 when the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy seized power. He fled Vienna for London in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and fascism was ascendant in Austria. After years of unsuccessfully seeking employment at universities in the United Kingdom, he moved to the United States in 1940 where he joined the faculty at Bennington College and later taught at Columbia University.

Early life

Karl Polanyi was born in Vienna and raised in Budapest by a German‑speaking Jewish family assimilating into the secular middle class.[5][6] His younger brother was Michael Polanyi, a philosopher, and his niece was Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist.[7] He was born in Vienna, at the time the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.[8][page needed] His father, Mihály Pollacsek, was a railway entrepreneur. Mihály never changed the name Pollacsek, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Budapest. Mihály died in January 1905, which was an emotional shock to Karl, and he commemorated the anniversary of Mihály's death throughout his life.[9] Karl and Michael Polanyi's mother was Cecília Wohl. The name change to Polanyi was made by Karl and his siblings.

Polanyi was well educated despite the ups and downs of his father's fortune, and he immersed himself in Budapest's active intellectual and artistic scene. Polanyi studied at the Minta Gymnasium.[10]

Early career

Polanyi founded the radical and influential Galileo Circle while at the University of Budapest, a club which would have far reaching effects on Hungarian intellectual thought. During this time, he was actively engaged with other notable thinkers, such as György Lukács, Oszkár Jászi, and Karl Mannheim. Polanyi graduated from Budapest University in 1912 with a doctorate in Law. In 1914, he helped found the National Citizens' Radical Party of Hungary and served as its secretary.[citation needed]

Polanyi was a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I, in active service at the Russian Front and hospitalized in Budapest. Polanyi supported the republican government of Mihály Károlyi and its Social Democratic regime. The republic was short-lived, with socialist Béla Kun toppling the Karolyi government to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Polanyi left Hungary for Vienna in order to undergo medical treatment. During this time, the Kun government was replaced by the right-wing authoritarian regime of Admiral Horthy.[11] As a consequence, Polanyi left Hungary permanently.[6][11]

In Vienna

From 1924 to 1933, he was employed as a senior editor of the prestigious Der Österreichische Volkswirt (The Austrian Economist) magazine. It was at this time that he first began criticizing the Austrian school of economics, which he felt created abstract models that lost sight of the organic, interrelated reality of economic processes. Polanyi himself was attracted to Fabianism and the works of G. D. H. Cole. It was also during this period that Polanyi first developed an interest in Christian socialism.

Polanyi married the communist revolutionary Ilona Duczyńska, who was of Polish-Hungarian background. Their daughter Kari Polanyi Levitt carried on the family tradition of academic economic research.

In London

Polanyi was asked to resign from Der Oesterreichische Volkswirt because the liberal publisher of the journal could not keep on a prominent socialist after the accession of Hitler to office in January 1933 and the suspension of the Austrian parliament by the rising tide of clerical fascism in Austria. He left for London in 1933, where he earned a living as a journalist and tutor and obtained a position as a lecturer for the Workers' Educational Association in 1936. His lecture notes contained the research for what later became The Great Transformation. However, he would not start writing this work until 1940, when he moved to Vermont to take up a position at Bennington College. Polanyi had for many years sought employment at British universities but was unsuccessful.[6] The book was published in 1944, to great acclaim.[12] In it, Polanyi described the enclosure process in England and the creation of the contemporary economic system at the beginning of the 19th century.[citation needed]

United States and Canada

Polanyi joined the staff of Bennington College in 1940, teaching a series of five timely lectures on the "Present Age of Transformation".[13][14] The lectures "The Passing of the 19th Century",[15] "The Trend Towards an Integrated Society",[16] "The Breakdown of the International System",[17] "Is America an Exception?",[18] and "Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution"[19] took place during the early stages of World War II. Polanyi participated in Bennington's Humanism Lecture Series (1941)[20] and Bennington College's Lecture Series (1943) where his topic was "Jean Jacques Rousseau: Or Is a Free Society Possible?"[21]

After the war, Polanyi received a teaching position at Columbia University (1947–1953). However, his wife, Ilona Duczyńska (1897–1978), had a background as a former communist, which made gaining an entrance visa in the United States impossible. As a result, they moved to Canada, and Polanyi commuted to New York City. In the early 1950s, Polanyi received a large grant from the Ford Foundation to study the economic systems of ancient empires.

Having described the emergence of the modern economic system, Polanyi now sought to understand how "the economy" emerged as a distinct sphere in the distant past. His seminar at Columbia drew several famous scholars and influenced a generation of teachers, resulting in the 1957 volume Trade and Market in the Early Empires. Polanyi continued to write in his later years and established a new journal entitled Coexistence. In Canada he lived in Pickering, Ontario, where he died in 1964.

Selected works

Dalton, George, ed. Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1968); collected essays and selections from his work.

Pearson, Harry W., ed. The Livelihood of Man (Academic Press, 1977)

Polanyi, Karl. 'The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Insights of Our Time.' (Boston: Beacon Press. 1944) ISBN 0-8070-5679-0

Polanyi, Karl, Conrad M. Arensberg, and Harry W. Person, eds. Trade and Market in the Early Empires (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1957)

Polanyi, Karl. Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, (1966).

Polanyi, Karl. For a New West: Essays, 1919–1958 (Polity Press, 2014), ISBN 978-0745684444

Articles by Karl Polanyi

"Socialist Accounting" (1922)

"The Essence of Fascism" (1933–1934); article[22]

"Universal Capitalism or Regional Planning?", The London Quarterly of World Affairs, vol. 10 (3) (1945)

See also

Michael Polanyi (brother)

John Polanyi (nephew)

Eva Zeisel (cousin)

Notes

 Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2003) vol 9. p. 554

 "Karl Polanyi | Hungarian politician | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved 3 August 2022.

 "Karl Polanyi". Oxford Reference. Retrieved 26 July 2021.

 Silver 2007.

 Dale 2016a, pp. 11, 17–18.

 Ferguson, Donna (23 June 2024). "'The greatest thinker you've never heard of': expert who explained Hitler's rise is finally in the spotlight". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712.

 Harrod 2012.

 Dale 2016a.

 Dale 2016a, p. 13.

 Adelman, Jeremy (2017). "Polanyi, the Failed Prophet of Moral Economics". Boston Review.

 "The Elusive Karl Polanyi". Dissent Magazine. 2017.

 Melegh, Attila; Szelényi, Iván (2016). "Polanyi Revisited. Introduction". Intersections. EEJSP. 2 (2): 4–10. doi:10.17356/IEEJSP.V2I2.246.

 Polanyi, Karl (1940). Karl Polanyi: Five Lectures on The Present Age of Transformation-Lecture Series Listing of Topics (Speech). Five Lectures on The Present Age of Transformation. Bennington College: Bennington College. hdl:11209/8502.

 Leigh, Robert D. (25 September 1940), "Letter from President Robert Devore Leigh to Peter Drucker", Letter, Bennington College, hdl:11209/5449

 Polanyi, Karl (1940). The Passing of 19th Century Civilization (Lecture #1 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8514.

 Polanyi, Karl (1940). The Trend Towards an Integrated Society (Lecture #2 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8515.

 Polanyi, Karl (1940). The Breakdown of the International System (Lecture #3 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8516.

 Polanyi, Karl (1940). Is America an Exception? (Lecture #4 of 5) (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8517.

 Polanyi, Karl (1940). Marxism and the Inner History of the Russian Revolution (Speech). Bennington College. hdl:11209/8518.

 Boas, George; Fergusson, Francis; Patterson, Margaret; Chapman, Dwight; Hardman, Yvette; Kouwenhoven, John; Luening, Otto; Polanyi, Karl; Stein, Peg; Truman, David; Smith, Bradford; Whittinghill, Maurice (April 1941), Bennington College Humanism-Lecture Series Listing of Speakers and Topics, Bennington College, hdl:11209/8501

 Polanyi, Karl; Fergusson, Francis; Mendershausen, Horst; d'Estournelles, Paul; Drucker, Peter F.; Hanks, Lucien; Forbes, John D. (1943), Bennington College Lecture Series, 1943 – Lecture Series Listing of Speakers and Topics, Bennington College, hdl:11209/8499

 Polanyi, Karl (1935). Lewis, John; Polanyi, Karl; Kitchin, Donald K. (eds.). "The Essence of Fascism". Christianity and the Social Revolution. London: Victor Gollancz Limited. pp. 359–394.

References

Library resources about

Karl Polanyi

Resources in your library

Resources in other libraries

By Karl Polanyi

Resources in your library

Resources in other libraries

Block, Fred (2008). "Polanyi's Double Movement and the Reconstruction of Critical Theory". Revue Interventions économiques [En ligne]. 38 (38). doi:10.4000/interventionseconomiques.274.

Dale, Gareth (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, Polity, ISBN 978-0-7456-4072-3

Dale, Gareth (2016), Reconstructing Karl Polanyi, Pluto Press, ISBN 978-0745335186

Dale, Gareth (2016a). Karl Polanyi : a life on the left. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-17608-8. OCLC 948826672.

Dale, Gareth (2016b), Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings

Harrod, Tanya (15 January 2012). "Eva Zeisel obituary". The Guardian.

Humphries, S. C. (1969). "History, Economics, and Anthropology: The Works of Karl Polanyi". History and Theory. 8 (2): 165–212.

Humphries, S. C., Vol. 8, No. 2, 1969, 165-212.

McRobbie, Kenneth, ed. (1994), Humanity, Society and Commitment: On Karl Polanyi, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 1-895431-84-0

McRobbie, Kenneth; Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, eds. (2000), Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contemporary Significance of The Great Transformation, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 1-55164-142-9

Mendell, Marguerite; Salée, Daniel (1991), The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century, St. Martins Press, ISBN 0-312-04783-5

Polanyi-Levitt, Kari, ed. (1990), The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi: A Celebration, Black Rose Books Ltd., ISBN 0-921689-80-2

Silver, Morris (2007). "Redistribution and Markets in the Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia: Updating Polanyi". Antiguo Oriente. 5: 89–112.

Stanfield, J. Ron (1986), The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi: Lives and Livelihood, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-333-39629-4

Further reading

Adaman, Fikret, Pat Devine, eds. Economy and Society: Money, Capitalism and Transition. Black Rose Books, 2002. Additional subtitle: reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange: embedding the economy in society. Essays based on the legacy of Karl Polanyi.

Aulenbacher, Brigitte, et al. (ed.), Karl Polanyi, the life and works of an epochal thinker. Falter Verlag, 2020.

Block, Fred and Somers, Margaret, The Power of Market Fundamentalism : Karl Polanyi's Critique. Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2014.

Brie, Michael (ed.), Karl Polanyi in dialogue : a socialist thinker for our times, Montreal : Black Rose Books, 2017.

Brie, Michael and Thomasberger, Claus, Karl Polanyi's vision of a socialist transformation. Montreal : Black Rose Books, 2018.

Dale, Gareth, Karl Polanyi : a life on the left, New York : Columbia University Press, 2016.

Dale, Gareth, et al. (ed.), Karl Polanyi's political and economic thought : a critical guide. Newcastle upon Tyne : Agenda Publishing, 2019.

Dale, Gareth, Reconstructing Karl Polanyi : excavation and critique, London, England : Pluto Press, 2016.

Desai, Radhika and Polanyi Levitt, Kari, Karl Polanyi and twenty-first-century capitalism. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2021.

Hann, Chris, Repatriating Karl Polanyi Market Society in the Visegrád States. Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2019.

Kuttner, Robert, "The Man from Red Vienna" (review of Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, Columbia University Press, 381 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 55–57. "In sum, Polanyi got some details wrong, but he got the big picture right. Democracy cannot survive an excessively free market; and containing the market is the task of politics. To ignore that is to court fascism." (Robert Kuttner, p. 57.)

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Karl Polanyi.

Karl Polanyi Digital Archive

The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy – The Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University web site.

Karl Polanyi Wiki

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944) Review Essay by Anne Mayhew, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tennessee

Profile on Karl Polanyi – On the History of Economic Thought Website

The free market is an impossible utopia (2014-07-18), The Washington Post. A conversation with Fred Block and Margaret Somers on their book, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard University Press, 2014). The book argues that the ideas of Karl Polanyi are crucial to help understand economic recessions and their aftermath.

[1] – Why Two Karls Are Better Than One: Integrating Polyani and Marx in a Critical Theory of the Current Crisis by Nancy Fraser

Ferguson, Donna (23 June 2024). "'The greatest thinker you've never heard of': expert who explained Hitler's rise is finally in the spotlight". the Guardian. Retrieved 23 June 2024.

Works by or about Karl Polanyi at the Internet Archive

==

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Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and Contemporary Capitalism

Brigitte Aulenbacher · Richard Bärnthaler · Andreas Novy

© Österreichische Gesellschaft für Soziologie 2019

1 Seventy-five years of The Great Transformation: history, presence, future

Seventy-five years ago, in April 1944, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation—On the origins ofour 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 re-order 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).

 

B. Aulenbacher ()

Institut für Soziologie, Abt. für Gesellschaftstheorie und Sozialanalysen, Johannes Kepler

Universität, Altenberger Str. 69, 4040 Linz, Austria E-Mail: brigitte.aulenbacher@jku.at

R. Bärnthaler

Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien,

Welthandelsplatz 1/D4, 1020 Vienna, Austria E-Mail: Richard.baernthaler@univie.ac.at

A. Novy

Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien,

Welthandelsplatz 1/D4, 1020 Vienna, Austria

E-Mail: andreas.novy@wu.ac.at

Karl Polanyi reflected on ruptures and transformations; a topic area that lost its appeal after World War II. His contemporary John Maynard Keynes seemed to be much better suited to offer practical tools for steering capitalist market economies. Keynes’ demise as the leading economist of the mid-20th century, however, began with the return of crisis and instability in the 1970s (Polanyi Levitt 2013). Although the 1970s have to be seen as the origin of a new “wave” of “marketization” (Burawoy 2015), the renaissance of Polanyi’s œuvre, particularly with regard to TGT, started, as Polanyi Levitt and Mendell testify in this volume, in the 1980s.

Deepened by neoliberal globalisation from the 1990s onwards and intensified around the turn of the century due to protests against free trade and neoliberalism, it was this new politico-economic atmosphere in which Karl Polanyi was rediscovered. The foreword of Joseph Stiglitz to the new edition of TGT in 2001 indicates that the emerging world order might resemble the perished liberal civilization of the gold standard. Rodrik’s (2011) notion of the “globalization paradox” further systematized the claim that hyperglobalisation, national sovereignty, and democracy cannot be obtained together. The contradictions inherent in globalisation processes stimulated debates on the specific form of contemporary countermovements (Silver and Arrighi 2003), led to concrete proposals to embed the economy to achieve inclusive prosperity (Naidu et al. 2019), and triggered more radical pleas for selective economic deglobalisation (Novy 2017).

Taking up the vivid debates on TGT (cf. Block and Somers 2014; Gemici 2008, 2015; Lacher 2007), Gareth Dale’s trilogy on Polanyi delivered the much needed biographical and theoretical embedding of Polanyi’s key concepts in this new area (Dale 2010, 2016a, 2016b). Over the last years, Polanyi gained influence not only in academia but also in the public debate. The critique of a culture of commodification and marketization, which has, at least since the Washington Consensus, been captured in the slogan “The world is not for sale”, inspired not only analysis but also political agency. Whilst The Economist has identified Polanyi as a key inspiration for Jeremy Corbyn’s type of democratic socialism, Robert Kuttner’s (2017) extended review of Dale’s Polanyi biography in the New York review of books popularized “the man from Red Vienna”.

Since the (new round of) globalisation after 1989, new conflicts and protests have arisen and a re-ordering of society has again been put on the agenda. Karl Polanyi has become a key reference in research efforts to understand the contradictions inherent to the market economy and neoliberal globalisation. This notable renaissance of Polanyi’s œuvre unites approaches of scholars from economics, sociology, and political science under at least five broad endeavours. First, by rediscovering the core motif of TGT, scholars have investigated whether we are witnessing another great transformation of capitalism today. In so doing, they seek to show in how far Polanyi’s perspectives can facilitate an understanding of the last five decades’ developments (Atzmüller et al. 2019; Burawoy 2015; Bugra and A˘ gartan˘ 2007; Palumbo and Scott 2017). Such a re-reading of Karl Polanyi in a contemporary context particularly reflects on his analysis and interpretation of the history of capitalism as the result of a “double movement”, i.e. the “movement” towards a commodification of land (nature), labour, money, and other “fictitious commodities” like knowledge

(Burawoy 2015) or care (Fraser 2013) and the “countermovements” such as protective public policies and social or labour movements that struggle against the perils of a “market society”. Such references to Polanyi’s core figures and arguments go along with detailed and contested revisions and actualizations (Block and Somers 2014; Burawoy 2015; Fraser 2013) as well as with discussions regarding competing approaches, particularly the Marxian analysis of capitalism (cf. Dörre in this volume; Holmes 2012; Silver 2003), Cultural Political Economy (Sum and Jessop 2013), neo-institutionalism (Aulenbacher et al. 2018), and social innovation research (Moulaert et al. 2013). Second, although or because the future is uncharted territory scholars have re-discovered Polanyian concepts in social-ecological transformation research, popularized by a report for the German government (WBGU 2011), leading to studies on new concepts of work (Barth et al. 2018) as well as a new mode of living (Brand and Wissen 2017; Luks 2019). Third, in terms of his analysis of capitalism and society, Polanyi (2001) inspires us to engage with the contradictions of economic “improvement” and sociocultural “habitation” in an emancipatory manner (Holmes 2018; Novy et al. 2019). Fourth, a “substantivist” understanding of the economy (Peck 2013) perceives it as an “instituted process” (Polanyi 1977, p. 31) with different modes of provisioning—“reciprocity”, “redistribution”, “exchange”, and “householding”. Polanyi does not restrict the analysis of capitalism to market exchange and processes of marketization. This leads to a further core motif of his œuvre: the relation between economy and society and how to put (market) economy in its place (again). Fifth and finally, Polanyian reflections on the survival of humankind under the auspices of “industrial civilization” and the “machine age” as well as his idea of “freedom in a complex society” (Polanyi 2001; Brie and Thomasberger 2018 and in this volume; Cangiani 2012; Novy 2019) might inspire debates on contemporary neoliberalism, digitalisation, and planetary boundaries.

2 International research on, with, and after Karl Polanyi: composition of the special issue

This special issue on “Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and contemporary capitalism” unites distinguished scholars who demonstrate the vivacity of social research inspired by Polanyi’s reflections and concepts. It considers the history of TGT, the international debate around Polanyi over the last decades, contemporary re-readings of his œuvre, and its application in a variety of fields of research and different disciplines. There are two major reasons for our decision to take these steps: First, seventy-five years of TGT let us look back and forward—back on the roots of Polanyian perspectives and forward to present and future research inspired by his thoughts. Second, the special issue refers to the gala event on 8 May 2018 when the International Karl Polanyi Society (IKPS, http://www.karlpolanyisociety. com/) in Vienna has been founded. The contributions of this volume depict the elaborated articles of the opening speech and keynotes given and vividly discussed at the Chamber of Labour, Vienna, by a broad academic and non-academic audience. Their publication as special issue of the Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie (Austrian Journal of Sociology) symbolizes the idea to bring Karl Polanyi, who has been forced to migrate in fascist times, back to Austria and to stimulate the academic and non-academic discussion on future societies in Europe and beyond (cf. for example Valderrama 2012). Publishing in English aims to enter the international Polanyi community and network with a special issue which may provide insights in how scholars make use of his work in ‘our times’—a goal that was particularly highlighted during the foundation of the IKPS.

The special issue starts with an introduction by Kari Polanyi Levitt “On transformations: past, present and future?” in which Karl Polanyi’s daughter provides a vivid and personal account of the origins of TGT and proceeds to reflect on the return of a universalizing form of capitalism at the end of the 20th century. Criticizing the term as well as the content of globalization, she dwells on the relevance of reembedding markets in democratic control and state agency. Marcus Gräser continues by “Historicizing Karl Polanyi” in a specific way. Gräser identifies two research gaps in the renewed interest in Karl Polanyi. First, there is a lack of contextualizing the production process of TGT and in embedding Polanyi in his spatio-temporal context—especially his American experiences. Second, Polanyi’s approach, which keeps an eye out for a general logic in the distinctive national trajectories, can be seen as an idea-giver for global history—and for multi-level approaches, we would add. “Karl Polanyi and the global network inspired by his work” is an interview given by Marguerite Mendell, director of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy Montreal that hosts the Polanyi archive. In this interview, full of autobiographical reflections, she narrates the origin of her interest in Polanyi which dates back to the 1980s. Starting with archive research, she has discovered the relevance of applying Polanyi’s critique to the consequences of four decades of “planned neoliberalism”. While her own research focusses on social and solidarity economy, recent analyses are increasingly concerned with the ongoing authoritarian turn and the links between Trump and Brexit with neoliberal globalization. Polanyi’s critique of the illusion of a “self-regulating market” has been complemented by his reflections on fascism.

In “Polanyi: Classical moral economist or pioneer cultural political economist?” Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, founders of Cultural Political Economy (CPE) as a proper discipline, proceed in two steps. They describe Karl Polanyi as a classical moral economist based on a strong analytical distinction between substantivist and formal economics, which allowed Polanyi to identify a plurality of economic institutions that relate the economic and non-economic spheres. But Polanyi is, according to Jessop and Sum, also a precursor to cultural political economy. Although he neither applied critical discourse analysis nor critical political economy in a strict sense, he dwells in an innovative and intuitive way on key concerns of a critical semiotic institutionalism, e.g. in his analysis of economic liberalism as a faith. At the same time, Polanyi has substantially enriched critical political economy by introducing modes of provisioning beyond the market. Michael Brie und Claus Thomasberger approach a field which has so far received less attention in the renaissance of Karl Polanyi. “Karl Polanyi’s Search for Freedom in a Complex Society” identifies questions of freedom as one of Polanyi’s lifelong concerns. While the last chapter in TGT is dedicated to “freedom in a complex society”, Polanyi has written on this issue already in the 1920s and took the issue up in the 1950s again. He criticizes the liberal notion of freedom not as wrong, but as insufficient. Besides, he was also aware of the limits of sectional interests, including class movements that did not consider the consequences of their decisions for society as a whole. For Polanyi, freedom and responsibility are intertwined. Overview, an understanding of societal structures, is required for free agency and decision-making to overcome fragmentation and the dominance of sectional interests.

Maria Markantonatou uses Polanyi’s analysis of the conservative 1920s to understand contemporary Greece. In “Conservative 1920s” and conservative 2010s? Austerity politics in interwar Austria and present-day Greece, she compares these two “test cases”. The League of Nations in the 1920s and the Troika in the 2010s applied similar policy instruments by means of a deliberately interventionist political method, leading to comparable policy outcomes in different historical contexts. Markantonatou uses the empirical analysis to show the power of Polanyi’s concept of “authoritarian interventionism” in grasping the contradictory agency of liberal actors then and now. Sabine Frerichs reminds us that, although Polanyi had a doctoral degree in law, he gave astonishingly little attention to the role of law as both a commodifier and a decommodifier. In “Karl Polanyi and the law of market society” Frerichs dwells on this underdeveloped research field by relating Polanyi’s work to Marxist scholarship, more concretely Evgeny Pashukanis, and American institutionalism, especially John Rogers Commons. Law is decisive for commodification processes by guaranteeing property rights and contractual security, but in neoliberalism there even emerge “law markets” that permit shopping for the best legal framework for economic interactions. Frerichs eloquently exposes a dichotomous picture of two types of law that contain antagonistic rationalities and have the potential to counteract each other within the same political-economic system: “law as a commodity” that serves private interests and “law as an institution” that promotes public interest. Therefore, law can be market constraining, protective social legislation as well as market enabling, private, and international law. Ernst Langthaler and Elke Schüßler undertake a comparative analysis in two sectors, dealing with the “fictitious commodities” labour and land. In “Commodity Studies with Polanyi: Disembedding and Re-Embedding Labour and Land in Contemporary Capitalism” they enrich the study of commodity chains by analysing industrial relations in the garment industry and study the impact of the feed-livestock-meat complex on land, its ownership structure, land use, and uneven global development. Concluding, they tentatively put forward the argument that a “real” countermovement would probably have to find ways to re-embed land, labour, and money jointly, as all three are interlinked in driving the dynamics of contemporary commodity chains. Klaus Dörre examines the worldviews of employees with right-wing sympathies in German industrial and service enterprises. In “Take Back Control! Marx, Polanyi and Right-Wing Populist Revolt” he interprets interviews with right-leaning employees to grasp the relationship between contemporary market radicalism and authoritarian countermovements, currently institutionalized in Germany’s AfD. In line with Burawoy, Dörre distinguishes between market-critical and class movements, the first denominated Polanyian and the second Marxist. He shows how the Polanyian and Marxist ideal types are entangled in right-wing populist movements that emerge from inequalities as well as alienation due to increased competition. They demand a protective nation state to (re-)constitute a national community, but, by embracing core capitalist objectives of expansionism, they undermine their potential to take back control, which is at centre stage of their anti-systemic political stances.

The special issue also includes reviews on four recently published books that show the vivid discussions to conceptualize the re-ordering of contemporary societies inspired by Polanyi. Fabienne Décieux and Christian Leitner engage with Tim Rogan’s “The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism” (2017), which not only explicates Tawney, Polanyi, and Thompson as constitutive for a moral economy approach in 20th century England, but also provides an intellectual history of these three moral economists and interconnects them in an innovative way. Since questions of morality have gained importance in the face of multiple crises, the book seems to have been published just at the right time. Karl Beyer reviews Antonio Palumbo’s and Alan Scott’s “Remaking Market Society: A Critique of Social Theory and Political Economy in Neoliberal Times” (2017) in which the authors seek to formulate a powerful modernist counternarrative to both postmodern social theory and neoliberal political economy approaches towards social and economic change. For Beyer, the great merit of the book is its well-elaborated analytical framework for examining processes of implementing market rules within the public sector through New-Public-Management techniques. In so doing, the authors demonstrate the usefulness of a Polanyian political approach to analyze contemporary neo-liberalism. Christopher Holmes’ “Polanyi in Times of Populism—Vision and Contradiction in the History of Economic Ideas” (2018) takes a different approach by placing Polanyi in a postmodern tradition. Holmes interprets the TGT as aiming at uncovering systems of thought that seek to transcend the contradictions between economic “improvements” and sociocultural “habitation” into one abstract vision. However, as Polanyi noticed, people in a market society need both means for habitation and opportunities for improvement. Political decisions are, therefore, unavoidable. In his review, Richard Bärnthaler considers Holmes’ approach highly productive, both analytically as well as with regards to its practical consequences. It is a much-needed plea to recognise that the democratic precondition for any exploratory movement and learning process, which are so vital in times of transformation, is a society in which plural—and often incommensurable—interests, ideas, and values can be expressed and discussed. Finally, Christoph Deutschmann discusses “Karl Polanyi’s Vision of a Socialist Transformation” (2018), edited by Michael Brie and Claus Thomasberger 2018. The book, compiled by fifteen outstanding scholars from Europe, North America, and Asia, represents an impressive effort to clarify the ambiguities in Polanyi’s theoretical conceptualization and political and philosophical understanding of socialism. Although Deutschmann highlights that the book does not provide the reader with a red thread across Polanyi’s writings and ideas, it is nevertheless the best contemporary attempt to seriously engage with the contradictions, paradoxes, and unfinished thoughts in Polanyi’s work.

3 Conclusion of the special issue: re-discovering and re-reading Karl Polanyi for today

Whilst, in some respects, Polanyi arguably lacked some theoretical clarity and empirical depth (e.g. in his ambivalent depiction of laissez-faire in TGT), other criticism towards his work may have, at least partly, resulted from a historically institutionalized disciplinary blindness. Polanyi has often been conceived as too sociological for historians, too historical for economists, or too political for an academic (cf. Gräser in this volume). His approach has been—and, to some extent, still is—unconventional. Polanyi transgressed not only traditional disciplinary but also academic boundaries, deliberately moving between disciplines and engaging with extra-scientific actors (such as during his work for the Worker’s Educational Association in England, which laid the foundation for TGT). Polanyi did not provide us with a concrete methodological or methodical toolkit. Neither is his epistemology uncontested (cf. Holmes, who considers Polanyi a postmodern versus Palumbo and Scott, who place him in a modern tradition) or rigid. Instead, Polanyi offers a powerful heuristic to make sense of the heterogeneous and often contradictory societal developments in times of rupture and transformation—the interconnected nature of these developments does not respect traditional boundaries. Taking all this into account, Polanyi may have pointed the way ahead towards what today is known as transdisciplinary research.

He inspired not only important theoretical discussions (cf. Jessop and Sum; Brie and Thomasberger in this volume), but also a broad variety of empirical studies that apply different methodical tools (cf. Markantonatou; Langthaler and Schüßler; Dörre in this volume) to understand contemporary socio-economic, social-ecological, and socio-technical developments as well as their interrelations. The Polanyian framework, thus, is conducive to bringing together scholars from varying disciplinary backgrounds in productive ways. Such interaction seems vital to face the interlinked challenges of the 21st century. We can, however, not stop here. The challenge ahead of us will be to integrate extra-scientific actors into processes of knowledge production, thus, breaking down the all too artificial boundaries between science, policy, and society. Polanyi has not only been a role model in practice, but his flexible framework and often pragmatic stances allow to integrate not only different methods, methodologies, and epistemologies, but also different forms of knowledge.

Only through increased interaction among heterogeneous actors (both academic and extra-scientific) will it be possible to create new narratives, forms of sensemaking, and imaginaries democratically that lead us into a new transformation that does not proceed by disaster, but by design. The specific form of such transformation is contingent, open-ended, and needs to be shaped through experimentation. The IKPS aims to contribute to creating one of the many spaces which we need to rethink society and to transform capitalism in a way that humankind may survive industrial civilization of the last centuries and market-fundamentalism of the last decades. May the special issue be an inspiring contribution to such a debate.

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Silver, Beverly J., and Giovanni Arrighi. 2003. Polanyi’s “double movement”: the Belle Epoques of British and U.S. hegemony compared. Politics & Society 31(2):325–355.

Sum, Ngai-Ling, and Bob Jessop. 2013. Towards a cultural political economy: putting culture in its place in political economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Valderrama, Paula. 2012. Planning for freedom. International Journal of Political Economy 41(4):88–105. WBGU. 2011. Hauptgutachten. Welt im Wandel: Gesellschaftsvertrag für eine große Transformation. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen (WBGU).

https://www.wbgu.de/fileadmin/user_upload/wbgu.de/templates/dateien/veroeffentlichungen/ hauptgutachten/jg2011/wbgu_jg2011.pdf. Accessed 25 Feb 2019.

Brigitte Aulenbacher is Professor of Sociological Theory and Social Analysis, heads the Department for the Theory of Society and Social Analyses at the Institute of Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University Linz/Austria. She is vice-president of the International Karl Polanyi Society and co-edits (with Klaus Dörre) Global Dialogue—the Magazine of the International Sociological Association ISA.

Richard Bärnthaler works at the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development (Vienna University of Economics and Business) and at the Department of Development Studies (University of Vienna) on topics concerning science studies (resp. STS), philosophy of science, transdisciplinarity, and urban studies. Most recent publication: Navigating between improvement and habitation: Counter-Movements in housing and urban infrastructure in Vienna (fc. 2019, Edward Elgar; with A. Novy & B. Stadelmann).

Andreas Novy is a socioeconomist, associate professor at and head of the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development (MLGD) at Vienna University of Economics and Business. He has published extensively in the field of urban development, social innovation and transdisciplinarity. He is president of the International Karl Polanyi Society, hosted at MLGD.

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