Cangiani Michele - Economy and Society: Selected Writings

Chapters 124 Kari Polanyi Levitt 2018

Introduction Michele Cangiani and Claus Thomasberger 2018

This collection Polity Press 2018

The right of Karl Polanyi, Claus Thomasberger and Michele Cangiani to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2330-6

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2331-3(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Polanyi, Karl, 1886-1964, author.

Title: Economy and society : selected writings / Karl Polanyi ; [introduction by] Claus Thomasberger, Michele Cangiani.

Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017048523 (print) | LCCN 2018001867 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509523344 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509523306 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509523313 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Economics. | EconomicsPolitical aspects. | EconomicsSociological aspects.

Classification: LCC HB71 (ebook) | LCC HB71 .P64 2018 (print) | DDC 330dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048523

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Kari Polanyi Levitt encouraged the compilation of this book and supported its publication. She contributed to it with valuable advice and the translation from German of four chapters. She also gave the publisher permission to reproduce the material in this volume, as the owner of Karl Polanyi's literary legacy. Both we and the publisher are extremely grateful to her.

Polanyi's manuscripts published in this volume are deposited with Concordia University Library and are available from the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, Concordia University, Montreal. We wish to thank the Institute and in particular its director, Marguerite Mendell, and Ana Gomez for their efficient and friendly support for our work.

We also wish to thank the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, Berlin, and especially Michael Brie, for granting the permission to publish the translation of On Freedom from German.

Michele Cangiani and Claus Thomasberger

Karl Polanyi is regarded as one of the most influential social scientists of our epoch. His seminal book, The Great Transformation, is listed among twentieth-century classics. Polanyi was initially recognized as an economic anthropologist and historian. Later, his work entered the discourse of disciplines such as sociology, law and political science. Finally, and particularly since the beginning of the financial and economic crisis in 2007/8, he has become an indispensable point of reference in the broader public discussion. Leading intellectuals around the world refer to him as a source of inspiration. Economists, social scientists and activists engaged in challenging the current trends of neoliberal globalization, privatization and deregulation build on his writings. The 2016 Trade and Development Report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development describes the current situation as a Polanyi period, in which the regulatory and normative framework on which healthy markets depend, having already warped, is beginning to buckle [] Trust in political leadership is at an all-time low, just when the need for decisive political action is at an all-time high (p. ii).

In the critical discourse, Polanyi's notions, such as embeddedness, double movement, fictitious commodities, liberal utopia, self-regulating market system, transformation and patterns of integration, have become fundamental.

In our neoliberal era, an unprecedented wave of globalized investment and production, supported by an obsolete market mentality, and we are compelled to repeat this today.

Economic stagnation, increasing inequality, ecological and technological menaces, the decay of democratic institutions, the growing influence of nationalist parties and politicians, cultural and religious tensions as well as international conflicts threaten the social order established after the Second World War. There is a prevailing sense that political leaders have been overtaken by events, that they have lost control of the situation and thus confine themselves to denying the conflicts and buying time.

Polanyi would not have been surprised by current events neither by the attacks on democracy nor by the rebellion against economic globalization, commodification and the loss of cultural identity. He regarded the liberal project of institutionally separating the market system and subordinating the whole of society to its rules as no more than a first, utopian and historically limited response of humankind to the challenges of a technological civilization. His analysis of the collapse of the nineteenth-century European institutional set-up, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and two world wars invites comparison with the present crisis of the neoliberal institutional arrangement. Are we now witnessing the social and political disintegration of the neoliberal version of the nineteenth-century market economy that resulted in the Great Depression?

The latest financial crisis has exposed the fragility and limitations of modern civilization, thus bringing the question of the market society's future into the centre of the public discourse. Throughout his life, Polanyi was concerned with the human condition in contemporary social organization. The continuing relevance of his writings depends on the depth of his insight that a capitalist economy requiring ever larger markets and investment opportunities is incompatible with the human need for mutually supportive social relations and a well-balanced use of natural resources.

Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, states an often quoted passage of The Great Transformation human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighbourhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.