POLANYIAN LESSONS FOR OUR DAYS: THE CASE OF BRAZIL
Karl Polanyi is considered one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century in the fields of Economics, History, Anthropology and Sociology. For him, the object of Economics was to understand how human beings organize themselves as to deal with the material aspects of their lives; accordingly, he studied such subjects as the markets, trade and other economic institutions, trying to understand how they affect our lives. Born at the end of the XIX Century in Vienna, and raised in Budapest, Polanyi´s experience of the conflicts of the Central Europe of his youth, later reinforced by his years as an exiled intellectual in the England of the 1930’s, led him to propose that the convulsion that was shaking that world during those years was a reaction against a new (and very problematic) form of organization of the human society: the market society. In his understanding, although markets certainly were not a novelty, they had always occupied a restricted space in human life. However, since the Industrial Revolution they had moved to the forefront and turned the society into an accessory of the markets, and the crisis begun with the First World War was a reaction against this unnatural situation. Polanyi wrote some very important books about a wide variety of subjects in economic history. In all of them is clear his concern to show, through contrasts and comparisons, the specificity of the capitalist economies. One of his books, The Great Transformation, is considered not only his main work, but also one of the most important books in the social sciences in the past century 1 . Polanyi analyzes in this book, in his unique style, the social consequences of the economic organization that characterized the societies of the XIX century. Some central insights of this book represent the first formulations of the basic agreements of the substantivist school 2 , which maintains that the study of the economic aspects of any society should stress the role of its culture, its institutions and its history; or, to put it in Polanyi´s terms, should recognize that the economy is embedded in the society. The impact of the work of Polanyi goes well beyond his life and his work. His main insights are lively discussed nowadays 3 . Contemporary scholars apply his main insights both to the research about Ancient Economies (e.g., Tandy, 2001), as well as on the contemporary ones (e.g., Adaman & Devine, 2002) 4 . This paper will follow this last approach, trying to apply his basic insights to understand the evolution of Brazilian society, especially looking at the development and present situation of the of the markets for what he called the three fictitious commodities, land, labor and money. To do this, the paper is structured in three sections. In the first one, we discuss Polanyi´s worldview, searching for the main motivations of his work. In section II, we discuss the work of some scholars that in the last two decades 1
Rather surprisingly, it was included in the list “One hundred most influential books since World War II” on the Oct 6, 1995 issue of The Times Literary Supplement. 2 Polanyi’s perspective has also a strong link with the original institutionalist school, and he can be considered as one of its members. One of Polanyi’s most important students, Walter Neale, became a leading figure of the Association for Evolutionary Economics. 3 One of the main institutions promoting works along these lines is the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, founded in 1987 and based in Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada, and created “…in response to the growing recognition of the relevance of Karl Polanyi's work to contemporary society”, according to its homepage, http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/polanyi/ (access on April 15, 2007). 4 In Brazil, however, there has not been recently much discussion based on Polanyi´s perspectives. Some exceptions we can mention are Lisboa (2000), Garlipp (2006) and Wjuniski & Fernandez (2008).
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