A Critical Analysis of Peltzman’s “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation”

Karl Polanyi considered that the relationship between the markets and their societies was a central feature of any social order. He studied what he called "ancient societies," to compare them with his own times, in an effort to understand that subject. This paper aims to show, following Polanyi's work on Classical Greece, that it is possible to make a clear analogy between the Athenian state and economy with the modern Welfare State. First, we present Polanyi's study of the early Athenian economy, focusing on the coexistence of a kind of state economic planning and a market. Second, we show how this relates to Polanyi's emphasis in the comparison of different societies and times. Third, we characterize the contemporary Welfare State to make an analogy between these two forms of economic organization. We conclude by underlining the relevance of this analogy in understanding the societies of today.     

Class Struggle or Embedded Markets? Marx,Polanyi and the Meanings and Possibilities of Social Transformation

Marx and Polanyi both held that socialism, in one form or another, was a preferable and possible alternative to capitalism. Their ideas are seen to offer theoretical tools to understand the tensions and contradictions of capitalism, and to inform ways to overcome them. This paper discusses Polanyi's work from a Marxist perspective in order to illuminate his strengths and weaknesses. Its main focus is to discuss Polanyi's juxtaposing of commodification against exploitation, in diagnosing the problems of capitalist expansion. We suggest that by juxtaposing these two moments, Polanyi not only misses out on a crucial arena of capitalist activity (exploitation), but also undermines his own explication of processes of commodification. This has deleterious consequences for his understanding of the prevalence of poverty under capitalism. It also means that his vision of social transformation and of socialism is profoundly different, and potentially antithetical, to that of Marx. We suggest that for Polanyi's conception of de-commodification to gain greater traction it needs to be combined with Marx's analysis of exploitation and class struggle.     

Polanyi and Post-neoliberalism in the Global South: Dilemmas of Re-embedding the Economy

Although Karl Polanyi Studied a different epoch and focused on Europe, his ideas have inspired an outpouring of studies on contemporary problems and prospects in the neoliberal era. The bulk of these studies pertain to industrial countries or global economic issues. However, the human, environmental and financial impact of market deregulation is arguably more devastating in the ‘developing’ countries than in the core. A question thus arises: do Polanyi's reflections on progressive alternatives to liberalism clarify contemporary debates on development alternatives in the Global South? I contend that democratic socialism – Polanyi's preferred remedy to the ‘demolition’ of society and nature occasioned by market civilisation – is problematical in light of what we have learned from the twentieth century, but his framework for evaluating alternatives – featuring the re-embedding of economy in society – remains as powerful as ever, I support this argument with an exploration of socialism and social democracy – as well as community – based alternatives arising from ‘reciprocity’. Each possibility raises distinctive dilemmas, as an analysis of cases reveals.     

Thomas DeGregori’s “Back to the Future”: A Comment

A fundamental principle of Karl Polanyi's institutional outlook is that any economic system has to be considered as a whole and as a historically specific social organization. This principle implies a comparative method and a critique of conventional economics. Besides, the problem of the interrelation between the economic system and other aspects of social life cannot be avoided. On this basis, Polanyi points out the peculiar "economic" nature of the market-capitalist society and explains the institutional transformations characterizing its history. The opposition "embedded/disembedded," used by Polanyi to distinguish pre-modern economies from the market economy, has been widely adopted in recent times, particularly by economic sociologists, as a key for understanding current complex economic phenomena. However, the reference to Polanyi often presupposes a distorted interpretation of his theory, and a different kind of institutional approach.     

Banks as Continuous Reinvention

Of the several debates that revolve around the work of the economic historian and political economist Karl Polanyi, one that continues to exercise minds concerns his analysis of, and political attitudes toward, post-war capitalism and the welfare state. Simplified a little, it is a debate with two sides. To borrow Iván Szelényi's terms, one side constructs a ‘hard’ Karl Polanyi, the other a ‘soft’ one. The former advocated a socialist mixed economy dominated by redistributive mechanisms. He was a radical socialist for whom the market should never be the dominant mechanism of economic coordination. His ‘soft’ alter ego insisted that the market system remain essentially intact but be complemented by redistributive mechanisms. The ‘double movement’ – the central thesis of his ‘Great Transformation’ – acts, in this reading, as a self-correcting mechanism that moderates the excesses of market fundamentalism; its author was positioned within the social-democratic mainstream for which the only realistic desirable goal is a regulated form of capitalism. In terms of textual evidence there is much to be said for both interpretations. In this article I suggest a different approach, one that focuses upon the meaning of Polanyi's concepts in relation to their socio-political and intellectual environment.     

Stanfield’s Concepts of Social and Political Economy: Introduction to the Special Issue

This paper examines the contributions of James Ronald Stanfield to social and political economy. We start the analysis with Stanfield’s contribution to institution building through his education of PhD students, building a graduate program in political economy, and through the associations of social and political economy. Then we go on to scrutinise his creative developments and applications of the notions of economic surplus and social reproduction. This is followed by his extensive work on Karl Polanyi and the disembedded economy. Finally we explore his path-breaking analysis of the great capitalist restoration, the nurturance gap and love. Stanfield was one of the greatest institutionalists and social economists of the last hundred years, and these four areas of energetic creativity are his prime achievements in the area.     

Globalization,Gender And The Davos Man

Using Karl Polanyi's analysis of the social construction of markets in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, the paper applies his analysis to the formation of global markets in the late twentieth century. The paper argues that Polanyi's work needs to be engendered in order to take into consideration women's and men's different links to the market and to understand the construction of "economic man" gone global. The paper also addresses the feminization of the labor force across the globe and the possible effects on women's behavior and on the construction of "economic woman." The concluding section discusses alternative interpretations of this behavior.     

Economic Surplus,Social Reproduction,Nurturance and Love

This paper examines the contributions of James Ronald Stanfield to social and political economy. We start the analysis with Stanfield’s contribution to institution building through his education of PhD students, building a graduate program in political economy, and through the associations of social and political economy. Then we go on to scrutinise his creative developments and applications of the notions of economic surplus and social reproduction. This is followed by his extensive work on Karl Polanyi and the disembedded economy. Finally we explore his path-breaking analysis of the great capitalist restoration, the nurturance gap and love. Stanfield was one of the greatest institutionalists and social economists of the last hundred years, and these four areas of energetic creativity are his prime achievements in the area.

     

The Polanyi-Stanfield Contribution: Reembedded Globalization

This essay describes and interprets J. Ron Stanfield’s analysis of Karl Polanyi. Stanfield has helped to clarify Polanyi’s “double-movement” thesis by arguing that the double movement of self-regulating market forces and the protective response is essentially about freedom versus security. These insights provide an analysis that takes Polanyi into the twenty-first century by developing a theory of “reembedded globalization.” This is not something that Polanyi experienced before his death in 1964. Corporate globalization and the escalation of free-market rhetoric have led to a new round of disembedding since the 1970s, and this is evident by both the top-down, corporate globalization of privatization, deregulation, and marketization, as well as, by the challenges to it from the “movement of movements” coalescing around the World Social Forum. The most conspicuous evidence of this neo-protective response and its challenge to corporate-driven market forces is that between the security needs of the world’s globalization victims and the freedom of transnational corporations to make profits anywhere and in any way throughout the world. Understanding the clash in this way suggests that for humanity to save itself, it must struggle to reembed globalization and put security ahead of unbridled freedom. Reembedding globalization requires asserting democratic security ahead of the economic freedom of big business.     

Problems of Modern Technology

This essay identifies a contradiction between the flourishing interest in the environmental economics of the classical period and a lack of critical parsing of the works of its leading representatives. Its focus is the work of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. It offers a critical analysis of their contribution to environmental thought and surveys the work of their contemporary devotees. It scrutinizes Smith's contribution to what Karl Polanyi termed the "economistic fallacy," as well as his defenses of class hierarchy, the "growth imperative" and consumerism. It subjects to critical appraisal Malthus's enthusiasm for private property and the market system, and his opposition to market regulation. While Malthus's principal attraction to ecological economists lies in his having allegedly broadened the scope of economics, and in his narrative of scarcity, this article shows that he, in fact, narrowed the scope of the discipline and conceptualized scarcity in a reified and pseudo-scientific way.     

Profit Expectations and Confidence: Some unresolved issues in the Austrian/Post-Keynesian debate

Austrian and Post-Keynesian economists both continue to make important contributions to subjectivism in economics. Yet, as the ongoing debate between members of the two schools demonstrates, Austrians and Post-Keynesians have very different views about the possibility of intertemporal coordination in a market economy. This paper returns to the debate between Hayek and Keynes in order to respond to a contemporary Austrian critique of Keynes's theory of expectations. The paper shows that the fundamental difference between the two schools ultimately boils down to the nature of conventional expectations and the question of confidence. If the conventional expectation holds to assume the future will look enough like the present to give investors confidence in their decisions, Hayek's arguments about the possibility of intertemporal coordination merit attention. If, however, this convention does not hold, as Keynes thought was sometimes likely, the self-regulating potential of a market economy is called into question.     

Individuality and the economic order in Hegel's Philosophy of Right

This paper examines Hegel's perspective on the market economy, paying particular attention to how the market fits into his conception of freedom. Hegel's doctrine of freedom implies that market relations realize a distinctive form of freedom; however, due to the ontological deficiencies of this freedom, it must be subsumed under a superior freedom that is realized only within the state. The paper also explains why Hegel, although an economic liberal, does not accept the basic tenets of political liberalism, and why he does not regard economic science as a tool for public policy.     

Military Expenditures and Industrialization in Africa

My purpose here is to strengthen Karl Polanyi’s work through critique of and extension to abductive processes. Polanyi presented history woven into a new paradigm for analysis of socioeconomic systems, demonstrated discovery similar to abductive processes, and extended abduction into a holistic context. One of Polanyi’s most important contributions to socioeconomic analysis is the explanation of three integrated network models of socioeconomic reciprocity. They are coadjuvancy, redistribution, and market exchange. Polanyi extended abductive reasoning in two ways. First, he extended it beyond the cognitive logic of a person to inferences and societal belief changes of institutions. Second, he showed that, in the real world, beliefs are not only fixed like an abductive process, they are fixed in law. Throughout Polanyi’s historical presentation, market beliefs are being revised, thus serving as a demonstration of the abductive process. I make both positive and negative critique of a number of Polanyi’s concepts, with special attention to reciprocity, the double movement, and freedom. This critique and abduction extension strengthens Polanyi’s paradigm for future socioeconomic analysis with his integrative network models.     

“Social Freedom” in the Twenty-First Century: Rereading Polanyi

Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the genesis, crises, and institutional transformations of contemporary society is grounded on a theory of the basic features and dynamics of capitalism as a peculiar form of society. This article intends to develop this thesis on the basis of a reading of Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, with references to Polanyi’s preceding and later research. Polanyi’s theoretical and methodological achievements suggest a wide comparative outlook and offer a critique of economics, in addition to being deeply connected with his political philosophy. Polanyi’s approach seems to be nearer to the original institutional thought — from Karl Marx to Thorstein Veblen, from Max Weber to Adolf Löwe and Karl William Kapp — than to current neo-institutional tendencies in economics, sociology, and historiography. The hard problems society presently faces suggest the need to adhere to Polanyi’s radical point of view — that is, to a radical approach to Polanyi’s thought.     

Fair trade certification as oversight: an analysis of fair trade international and the small producers' symbol

In this article we analyse Fair Trade as a form of non-state regulation, building on the literature on the internal politics and governance of Fair Trade International (FTI) certification. We focus on recent developments in the FTI certification system, including the split of Fair Trade USA from FTI and the emergence of the Small Producer's Symbol (SPP) as an alternative to FTI certification. We highlight the role of the three regional Producer Networks, in particular the Latin American Producer Network, the CLAC, in the politics and governance of the FTI system. In order to analyse these issues we employ an alternative reading of Karl Polanyi's work in relation to Fair Trade. We problematise the claim made by some in the literature that FTI certification is an example of Polanyi's concept of re-embedding. Instead, we draw on Polanyi's concept of oversight to analyse Fair Trade certification. We argue that the emergence of the SPP out of the CLAC shows promise for being a mechanism of oversight more reflective of Polanyian re-embedding than FTI certification. We also emphasise how the growth of the SPP and the pressure from the Producer Networks have prompted governance reform within the FTI system.     

The New ‘Passive Revolution’ of the Green Economy and Growth Discourse: Maintaining the ‘Sustainable Development’ of Neoliberal Capitalism

This paper analyses the rapidly emerging discourse of a green economy based on green growth. It highlights inherent conflicts and contradictions of this discourse such as the myth of decoupling growth from the environment, pollution generations and resource consumption. Using key theoretical constructs of both Gramsci and Polanyi, the paper argues that the green economy/growth discourse can be seen as a Gramscian ‘passive revolution’ whereby the dominant sustainable development discourse, subsumed by capitalist hegemony, is protected in the context of global environmental, economic and development crises. The ‘neoliberalising of nature’, or in other words, the privatisation, marketisation and commodification of nature, akin to Polanyi's fictitious commodities, continues and intensifies with green economy/growth strategies. Greening the economy and associated strategies of green growth divert attention from the social and political dimensions of sustainability and issues of social and international justice. In this way, the inexorable march or ‘sustainable development’ of neoliberal capitalism is maintained. This paper goes on to argue that contesting the claims of green economy/growth discourse through political struggles by civil society against the neoliberalisation of nature is a sign of a slowly emerging counter-hegemonic ‘double movement’ which challenges capitalist hegemony and the commodification of society–nature relations.     

A Philosopher's Comment on Philosophico-Economic Relations

Scottish philosophers in the eighteenth century interpreted the market economy as a “civil society,” a path toward freedom and a new morality, separate from monarchal government. They expected markets to be self regulating and expected them to function with ties to a moral life. The market was a civil order, but that vision was destroyed when corporations rose to power in succeeding centuries, and governments were enlarged to regulate markets. Today we see a concern about big corporations and government bureaucracy, and a return to the idea of a “civil society.” This article proposes that today's vision of “civil society” is advanced by an economy that returns to its principles of self (civil) regulation. Markets become civil and self regulating when government, business, and nonprofits cooperate to create systems of social accountability for the common good. A self-regulating market is constructed experimentally through civil associations with self-enforceable codes of conduct, civic-oriented partnerships, legislation, banking, investments, and corporations whose policies are based on stakeholder studies that reduce moral and financial costs. Modest steps toward a self-regulating economy offers a foundation for today's version of a “civil society.”     

Smith on Ancient Egypt and the Arab Islamic World: A Tale of Two Statist Models

This paper endeavors to portray Egypt, the Arab, and Islamic worlds in the eyes of Adam Smith as implied in his work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations from the perspective of the extent and desirability of state intervention in the economy. In other words, the paper attempts to analyze why Smith's stance on ancient Egypt changed from an example of opulence to an eighteenth-century Egypt that—together with other Arab and Islamic countries—represents a model with many challengeable aspects, although the extent of the state action was remarkable in both models, the ancient and the contemporary. Our premise is that Smith did not defend or attack the models based on the extent of state intervention in the economy, but on whether its intervention was conducive to, first, raising the person's well-being and, second, promoting the morals of Smith's “commercial” society.     

Pastoral economics within the framework of a social economy

Eucken, in his paradigm of a functionally competitive social market economy, established the basis for a free market economy which institutionalizes concerns for economic and social justice. The Bishops’ Pastoral (and also the Lay Letter) on the U.S. economy approach the concept of a social and just economy from a Christian moral tradition. A community of interests between these two approaches, as well as Donaldson’s synthesis of Nozick’s and Rawl’s theories of justice, causes a moral-economic dialogue and cross fertilization to emerge. The Bishops postulate that the evolution of a just and fair market economy, as the guarantor of freedom, human dignity, and justice, cannot be left to chance but needs to be consciously guided. Therefore, they emphasize the integration of economic theories and policies with notions of “fairness” and “justice,” advocating a holistic approach in viewing the economic system as an organic whole. This paper shows that the broad economic guidelines, which Bishops suggest, fall within the framework of a functional market economy, i.e., a social market economy. It does not deal with the religious and biblical arguments of the Pastoral Letter.     

Memorable occasions

Eucken, in his paradigm of a functionally competitive social market economy, established the basis for a free market economy which institutionalizes concerns for economic and social justice. The Bishops’ Pastoral (and also the Lay Letter) on the U.S. economy approach the concept of a social and just economy from a Christian moral tradition. A community of interests between these two approaches, as well as Donaldson’s synthesis of Nozick’s and Rawl’s theories of justice, causes a moral-economic dialogue and cross fertilization to emerge. The Bishops postulate that the evolution of a just and fair market economy, as the guarantor of freedom, human dignity, and justice, cannot be left to chance but needs to be consciously guided. Therefore, they emphasize the integration of economic theories and policies with notions of “fairness” and “justice,” advocating a holistic approach in viewing the economic system as an organic whole. This paper shows that the broad economic guidelines, which Bishops suggest, fall within the framework of a functional market economy, i.e., a social market economy. It does not deal with the religious and biblical arguments of the Pastoral Letter.