Polanyi Karl - Karl Polanyi: the limits of the market

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, Ren 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, iek

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 OShea, 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, Hlne 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

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 Polanyis 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 Polanyis work yet existed. There is one useful and well-researched monograph, Ron Stanfields 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 Polanyis attention, was not his sole concern. Rather than giving a critical exposition of Polanyis 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 Stanfields, the only other monographs that even partially occupy the terrain of this book are Allen Sievers Critique of Karl Polanyis New Economics (1949) and Gregory Baums 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 subjects 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 Polanyis 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 Hungary

In addition to Polanyis 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 Sale (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 Polanyis 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 Polanyis 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 Montral. To Kari, in addition, I express my gratitude for her willingness to sit unflaggingly through interview after interview, in Montral and by telephone, over the course of nearly three years. Thanks are also due to Mathieu and Frdrique Denis, who helped to make my sojourns in Montral so welcoming and enjoyable, and to Brunel Universitys Business School and School of Social Sciences, which financed my conference and research trips.