Karl Polanyi E-Book

Gareth Dale

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 588

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century "market fundamentalism" it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s.

Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi's ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi's daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German.

This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi's thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Key Contemporary Thinkers series

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Abbreviations

Dedication

Introduction

1 The economics and ethics of socialism

Responsibility and ‘overview’: the socialist accounting debate

Critique and rejoinder

The subjugation of moral ends to economic means

Towards a synthesis of communism and Christianity

2 The Great Transformation

The Liberal Century: contradictions of a golden age

Birth of the market economy

Malthus, Ricardo and Speenhamland

Marketization and its backwash

Disruptive strains and the end of elasticity

The originality of The Great Transformation

Some criticisms of the conceptual framework

Some criticisms of the historical argument

3 The descent of economic man

Homo oeconomicus communisticus

The debate over methods

From marginalism to formalism

Two meanings of economic

Mechanisms of integration

Inconsistencies and ambiguities

The formalist rejoinder

Marxist interpositions

The debate scatters and dissolves

4 Trade, markets and money in archaic societies

Introduction: the oikos debate

‘Primitive’ and archaic trade, markets and money

Ancient Mesopotamia: three theses

Mesopotamia: evaluation and critique

Trade and markets in Bronze and Iron Age Greece

Greece: evaluation and critique

West Africa: Dahomey, Whydah and Tivland

Dahomey and the Tiv: evaluation and critique

From Meso-America to rural India via the Berber Highlands

Conclusion

5 ‘Disembedded’ and ‘always embedded’ economies

Embeddedness: a genealogy

Further adventures of a concept

Embeddedness and decommodification in the mid-twentieth century

6 At the brink of a ‘great transformation’? Neoliberalism and the countermovement today

Explaining the neoliberal ascendancy

Alternative futures: participatory planning and the mixed economy

No dearth of countermovements

Pendular forces

The Great Oscillation

Reflections on the current predicament

Conclusion

A liberal anti-communist?

A Marxist? A Romantic?

Tribute and critique

References

Index

Key Contemporary Thinkers series

Jeremy Ahearne, Michel de Certeau

Michael Caesar, Umberto Eco

M. J. Cain, Fodor

Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead

Rosemary Cowan, Cornel West

George Crowder, Isaiah Berlin

Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi

Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell

Reidar Andreas Due, Deleuze

Eric Dunning, Norbert Elias

Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett

Chris Fleming, René Girard

Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir

Andrew Gamble, Hayek

Neil Gascoigne Richard Rorty

Nigel Gibson, Fanon

Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin

Karen Green, Dummett

Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell

Christina Howells, Derrida

Fred Inglis, Clifford Geertz

Simon Jarvis, Adorno

Sarah Kay, Žižek

Valerie Kennedy, Edward Said

Chandran Kukathas and Philip Pettit, Rawls

Moya Lloyd, Judith Butler

James McGilvray, Chomsky

Lois McNay, Foucault

Dermot Moran, Edmund Husserl

Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes

Stephen Morton, Gayatri Spivak

Harold W. Noonan, Frege

James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars

William Outhwaite, Habermas: Second Edition

Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner

John Preston, Feyerabend

Chris Rojek, Stuart Hall

William E. Scheuerman, Morgenthau

Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein

Susan Sellers, Hélène Cixous

Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn

David Silverman, Harvey Sacks

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman

James Smith, Terry Eagleton

Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor

Felix Stalder, Manuel Castells

Geoffrey Stokes, Popper

Georgia Warnke, Gadamer

James Williams, Lyotard

Jonathan Wolff, Robert Nozick

Copyright © Gareth Dale 2010

The right of Gareth Dale to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4071-6 (hardback)

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Preface

This book is a critical introduction to the work of Karl Polanyi. It provides an exposition of his key texts and presents a range of criticisms of his principal theses. Its origins lie in my interest in Polanyi’s method. He meshes concepts from a variety of sociological and political-economic traditions to produce his own distinctive approach, but which ones was he appropriating and to what uses was he putting them? As I engaged more intensively with his works that sense of puzzlement began to recede. In its place there arose an admiration for the depth, breadth and originality of his intellectual engagement, albeit coupled with a greater awareness of its shortcomings in a number of areas, both empirical and theoretical. This book, then, is written from a broadly sympathetic yet critical standpoint.

During the first stages of my research it was at once apparent that no full-length general introduction to Polanyi’s work yet existed. There is one useful and well-researched monograph, Ron Stanfield’s The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi (1986), but as the title indicates its focus is upon economic thought, and this, although indubitably the centre of Polanyi’s attention, was not his sole concern. Rather than giving a critical exposition of Polanyi’s ideas, moreover, Stanfield tends to bend them towards his own neo-Veblenian framework. In addition, his book has by now become dated. In the intervening decades a profusion of new primary materials and secondary literature has been published, the world has turned, and Polanyi has gained new and wider audiences. Apart from Stanfield’s, the only other monographs that even partially occupy the terrain of this book are Allen Sievers’ Critique of Karl Polanyi’s New Economics (1949) and Gregory Baum’s Karl Polanyi on Ethics and Economics (1996), but neither is similar in purpose or character to this book. The former is a polemical critique, not a critical introduction, and anteceded the publication of all but one of its subject’s own books. The latter is an extended essay containing Polanyian meditations on theology and ethics.

In Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market I aspire to a comprehensive treatment of Polanyi’s work, but for reasons of space have omitted a number of topics. These I discuss elsewhere. They include, first and foremost, his political and intellectual formation in Hungary1 and his biography (the subject of my next book).2 They also include certain aspects of the ‘embeddedness’ theorem3 and of the research propaedeutic to the writing of The Great Transformation (in particular with respect to his understanding of ‘regulated capitalism’ and of the contradictions between democracy and capitalism),4 as well as his sometimes ambivalent and controversial comments on welfare states, the Bretton Woods system and the social democratic tradition.5

In addition to Polanyi’s published works, interviews with his daughter Kari Polanyi-Levitt, and the secondary literature – of which a trio of volumes from the early 1990s, edited by Polanyi-Levitt (1990), by Marguerite Mendell and Daniel Salée (1991) and by Kenneth McRobbie (1994), are the most valuable – I have relied heavily upon texts archived at the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University. It is thanks above all to my research there that I came to recognize the inadequacies of prevailing interpretations of Polanyi’s oeuvre, given that they rely for the most part upon such a limited range of his published (and mainly English-language) works. In what follows, citations that begin with numerals in the form ‘1-11’ are of folders and files in the Polanyi archive. Wherever possible I have included the dates of documents, and where I have made repeated use of a major text from the archive I have included it in the references. Translations from German sources, published and unpublished, are my own.

Karl Polanyi was an institutionalist, and it is perhaps fitting that, when turning to thank those who have helped this book on its way, I begin with an institution. The archive of the Karl Polanyi Institute was, as already mentioned, the source of all of the unpublished materials cited as well as a good many published ones. Containing draft manuscripts, correspondence with colleagues and friends, outlines of projected books, notes, memorabilia, part of Polanyi’s own library, and a cornucopia of other treasures, it is an indispensable resource – and one, moreover, that is well organized and welcoming. It is, then, to its co-founder, its administrator and its director – respectively, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, Ana Gomez and Margie Mendell – that I have incurred the greatest debts. I have also had the pleasure of attending two of the international Karl Polanyi conferences that the Institute has organized in recent years, in Istanbul and Montréal. To Kari, in addition, I express my gratitude for her willingness to sit unflaggingly through interview after interview, in Montréal and by telephone, over the course of nearly three years. Thanks are also due to Mathieu and Frédérique Denis, who helped to make my sojourns in Montréal so welcoming and enjoyable, and to Brunel University’s Business School and School of Social Sciences, which financed my conference and research trips.

As regards preparation of the manuscript, my greatest debt is to three individuals who read a penultimate draft in its entirety. Chris Hann meticulously combed through chapter after chapter, commenting eruditely and with humour upon my errors, and nudging me towards improvements. Georgi Derluguian was tremendously encouraging. His remarks were incisive and useful – and provide much food for thought for my next book too. Keith Hart offered penetrating criticisms and constructive suggestions. In addition, I would like to express thanks to Costas Lapavitsas, who read and provided insightful advice on several chapters of an early draft. (Our inconclusive debate on the origins of money convinced me to leave that topic to sink beneath the Mesopotamian sands.) Margie Mendell’s assiduous reading of one chapter helpfully uncovered a tangle of ambiguities while David Tandy and Mohammad Nafissi provided thoughtful comments on another. I am grateful to Dan Tompkins both for his observations on a chapter and for sharing his primary materials. In addition, Michael Hudson, Michele Cangiani, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, Tim Ingold, Johannes Renger and Keir Martin read and commented on one draft chapter each, Derek Wall checked part of the final manuscript, and Emma Hutchinson at Polity provided all the advice and support that one could possibly hope for. I wish to express my sincere thanks to them all.

Notes

1 Dale, 2009a, 2009b.

2 Dale, forthcoming.

3 Dale, in press, b.

4 Dale, 2008.

5 Dale, in press, a.

Abbreviations

DST   Karl Polanyi (1966) Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic EconomySeattle: University of Washington Press. LOM   Karl Polanyi (1977) The Livelihood of Man, New York: Academic Press. PAME   Karl Polanyi (1968) Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies, ed. George Dalton, New York: Anchor Books. TGT   Karl Polanyi (2001) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: Beacon Press. TMEE   Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson, eds (1957) Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, New York: Free Press. 

To the memory of Chris Harman (1942–2009)

Introduction

History has not been kind to Polanyi’s prognostications. Free market capitalism is a resilient and stable system in much of the world – particularly in English-speaking countries. The gold standard is gone, but has been replaced by floating exchange rates, set by market forces. Better monetary management has greatly reduced business cycle severity. The great puzzle of Polanyi’s book is thus its enduring allure, given the disconnect between his predictions and modern realities.

Gregory Clark, New York Sun, June 2008

Stock markets are in meltdown. Trade, investment, output and employment graphs all point south. Protectionist stirrings are in the air. The prescriptions of free market liberalism are revealed as recipes for chaos. The ‘smooth-tongued wizards’ of ‘the Market’ (Kipling) – of whom the just-quoted economics professor is a fine example – lost confidence in their spells. This was the outlook as I wrote these lines in early 2009. It was also the world of the early 1930s, over which the Hungarian economic journalist Karl Polanyi was casting his critical eye.

Polanyi was a child of late nineteenth-century liberalism. It was a civilization that, his friend G. D. H. Cole recalled, seemed to rest upon strong foundations, in contrast to the inter-war order, which ‘threatens to tumble at any moment in ruins about our ears’.1 Over the course of the turbulent 1930s Polanyi grappled with the causes of the crisis, developing a distinctive position that was presented in his masterwork, The Great Transformation (hereafter, TGT). It was a crisis, he argued, that should not be construed as occurring in disconnected stages – world war, Great Depression, world war – for these were all symptoms of a deeper malaise, a civilizational breakdown, no less. Tracing the genesis of the collapse, he located its origin in the rise of free market capitalism; in this sense liberal civilization had sown the seeds of its own destruction. Market society had generated two sorts of pathologies that could not be remedied by its own mechanisms. One may be described as ‘social diremption’, by which I refer to the separation of state and market that, in the age of universal suffrage, becomes converted into an irreconcilable antagonism between political democracy and business oligarchy. The other may be dubbed ‘ethical fragmentation’. Liberalism had created an ethically impoverished society, thanks to its creation of an environment in which human beings can only act effectively if they are rational egotists – the Homo oeconomicus model of man.

It is a critical diagnosis but the prognosis is not gloomy. Economic liberalism, Polanyi shows, was a utopian experiment and as such was bound to founder. Unlike any previous economic system the market economy, as it emerged in nineteenth-century Britain, stood out in that its functioning depended upon the commodification of land, labour and money. Turning such crucial components of the substance of life and nature over to the calculus of purchase and sale produced such corrosive tendencies that spontaneous reactions of ‘social protection’ were inevitable. Polanyi traces the ‘disruptive strains’ that ensue, which culminated in fascism and two world wars – during the last of which he wrote TGT. Yet despite being written at this darkest of times there is an implicit optimism: that a ‘protective’ society will win through in the end.

Karl Polanyi for the neoliberal age

For many years it has been apparent that Polanyi’s ideas resonate. They speak to the condition of neoliberal globalization in an idiom that for the most part sounds remarkably familiar today – as in his proposition, within a discussion of the nineteenth-century world economy, that ‘with free trade the new and tremendous hazards of planetary interdependence sprang into being’.2 There is no shortage of literature that draws on his work to warn that ‘market fundamentalism’, in the words of his compatriot and fellow émigré George Soros, poses an existential threat to the ‘open society’,3 or, in the more urgent idiom of William Greider, that so long as neoliberal dogma reigns unchallenged the ‘manic logic’ of globalization ‘will continue to hurtle forward, fatefully out of control’.4 The notion of a countermovement by society in response to the effects of the unregulated market system, one recent contribution avers,

is an inspired perspective to focus on globalisation, its discontents and the counter-movements it generates. … Neo-liberal globalisation – as Polanyi showed so eloquently for a previous wave – dissolves social bonds and society resists.