Karl Polanyi, the Market and Socialism
Arnault SKORNICKI
Is society sentenced to endure the law of the market? The publication of a number of essays by economist Karl Polanyi hitherto unpublished in French gives us the opportunity to re-discover democratic socialism as championed by the author of The Great Transformation. His thinking on political power’s capacity to organise economic exchanges still applies.
Review of: Karl Polanyi Essais. Paris Seuil, 2008, 589p. 29 €. Published by Michèle Cangiani and Jérôme Maucourant, translated by Françoise Laroche and Laurence Collaud, with a postface by Alain Caillé and Jean-Louis Laville. Today, Karl Polanyi’s legacy in domains as far-ranging as anthropology, (Marshall Sahlins, Louis Dumont), the history of ancient Greece (Moses Finley) or socio-economics (Mark Granovetter) comes into its own. Such a social sciences trend as MAUSS1 to which the authors of the postface, Alain Caillé and Jean-Louis Laville belong claim his mantle. It is no less true that his audience in France has long been at a disadvantage due to the delays and dearth in translations of this great Hungarian thinker’s prolific output. This thick volume, heralded a few years ago by Jérôme Maucourant in a small, luminous monograph entitled Avez-vous lu Polanyi? (La Dispute, 2005), puts paid once and for all to this deplorable state of affairs.
1
Mouvement anti-utilitariste en sciences sociales (Anti-Utilitarist Movement in the Social Sciences).