Draft-paper presented at the 13th International Karl Polanyi Conference ’ The Enduring Legacy of Karl Polanyi’, November 6‐8, 2014, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada Liberal capitalism was in effect man's initial response to the challenge of' the Industrial Revolution. In order to allow scope to the use of elaborate powerful machinery, we transformed human economy into a self-adjusting system of markets, and cast our thoughts and values in the mold of this unique innovation. Today … how to organize human life in a machine society is a question that confronts us anew. Behind the fading fabric of competitive capitalism there looms the potent of an industrial civilization with its paralyzing division of labor, standardization of life, supremacy of mechanism over organism, and organization over spontaneity. Science itself is haunted by insanity. This is the abiding concern (Polanyi 1947b: 109)
Fictitious Ideas, Social Facts and the Double Movement: Polanyi’s Framework in the Age of Neoliberalism Claus Thomasberger∗ In recent decades Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (hereafter, TGT) has become an important point of reference not only for activists and critical minds, but also for social scientists who feel uncomfortable with the current trends of economic globalization, liberalization, privatization and commodification. The increasing influence of the neoliberal creed on economic theory and policy since the 1980s has motivated numerous researchers to look for innovative categories and concepts in order to throw some light on the ongoing transformation of the economic and social environment. For many scholars, TGT affords a promising starting point for such an endeavor. Notions such as ‘the self-regulating market system’, ‘fictitious goods’, ‘protection of society’, ‘double movement’ or ‘embeddedness’ have become part of the standard repertoire, and not only in the critical discourse about globalization and neoliberalism. Starting from Mark Granovetter's 1985 article Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embedding, the so-called New Economic Sociology also relies heavily on Polanyi's work. Unfortunately, there is no consensus about how Polanyi’s concepts can be used fruitfully in the social conditions prevailing today. In part this may depend on the nature of the book. TGT is a complex book in
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University of Applied Sciences, Treskowallee 8, 10313 Berlin, Claus.Thomasberger@gmail.com.
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