Table Of Contentkarl polanyi’s political and
economic thought
a critical guide
Edited by Gareth Dale, Christopher Holmes and
Maria Markantonatou
© Editorial matter and selection, 2019 Gareth Dale, Christopher Holmes, Maria
Markantonatou. Individual contributions, the contributors.
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2019 by Agenda Publishing
Agenda Publishing Limited
The Core
Bath Lane
Newcastle Helix
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE4 5TF
www.agendapub.com
ISBN 978-1-78821-089-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-78821-090-4 (paperback)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International
contents
The Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Christopher Holmes
1. Economic ideas 7
Christopher Holmes and David Yarrow
2. International political economy 27
Randall Germain
3. The state 49
Maria Markantonatou and Gareth Dale
4. Class 69
Sandra Halperin
5. The gold standard 89
Samuel Knafo
6. Money 109
Kurtuluş Gemici
7. Commodification 131
Hüseyin Özel
8. Fascism 151
Gareth Dale and Mathieu Desan
9. Democracy 171
Paula Valderrama
10. Knowledge 191
Tilman Reitz
11. Afterword: resolving Polanyi’s Paradox 213
Michael Burawoy
Index 225
v
the contributors
Michael Burawoy teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the
author of Symbolic Violence: Conversations with Bourdieu (2019).
Gareth Dale teaches at Brunel University. His books include Reconstructing
Karl Polanyi (2016) and Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (2016).
Mathieu Desan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of
Colorado Boulder.
Kurtuluş Gemici teaches at the National University of Singapore. His
publications include “Karl Polanyi and the Antinomies of Embeddedness”
(Socio-Economic Review, 2008) and “The Neoclassical Origins of Polanyi’s
Self-Regulating Market” (Sociological Theory, 2015).
Randall Germain is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. His
teaching and research explores the political economy of global finance and the
evolution of theories of international political economy.
Sandra Halperin is Professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway,
University of London. Her research areas include global development, the his-
torical sociology of global relations, the causes and conditions of war and peace,
and Middle East politics.
Christopher Holmes is a Lecturer in International Political Economy at
King’s College, London. He is the author of Polanyi in Times of Populism: Vision
and Contradiction in the History of Economic Ideas (2018).
Samuel Knafo is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University
of Sussex. He is the author of The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance
and the Gold Standard (2013)
Maria Markantonatou received her PhD in 2005 from Albert Ludwigs
University, Freiburg, Germany. She is an Assistant Professor in political soci-
ology at the University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece, and is currently working
on the crisis in Greece.
vii
contributors
Hüseyin Özel is Professor of Economics at Hacettepe University, Turkey. His
doctoral dissertation, at University of Utah, was on the social theory of Karl
Polanyi. His current research is on globalization and the social/economic con-
sequences of neoliberalism.
Tilman Reitz is a professor of sociology at the University of Jena, Germany.
He received his PhD in philosophy in 2001 and has been working in both dis-
ciplines since 2009.
Paula Valderrama is a philosopher and economist. She wrote her doctoral
thesis on the social philosophies of Karl Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek at Free
University Berlin.
David Yarrow is a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, having com-
pleted his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2018. He is currently researching
post-growth statistical and accounting systems in global governance.
viii
introduction
Christopher Holmes
This book is designed to offer something to anyone with an interest in Karl
Polanyi’s work, whether a newcomer or a seasoned scholar. Each chapter offers
a comprehensive description and discussion of his major theses and ideas in
relation to ten themes essential to his work, followed by an afterword which
considers the insights offered by the book as a whole. The chapter themes span
the range of Polanyi’s political and economic interests, from the importance of
economic ideas, the various facets of the international economic system and the
role of the state, to his understanding of class, fascism and democracy. By read-
ing the whole volume, the reader can expect to come away with a full overview
of Polanyi’s political and economic thought and one which clearly unpacks the
relevance of his ideas to subsequent scholarship and contemporary issues.
The reader should not, however, expect to be presented with a single, uni-
fied picture of Polanyi’s intellectual contribution, because none exists. This is
in part because Polanyi was a writer and a polymath rather than a straight-
forward academic labourer, confined within the bounds of a particular disci-
pline. Following training as a lawyer in Budapest, he spent formative years as a
journalist in Vienna writing for the widely-read periodical Der Österreichische
Volkswirt. After that, he moved to Britain, supplementing continuing jour-
nalism with often precarious work tutoring for various universities and adult
education institutions. These two periods were critical to Polanyi’s intellectual
formation and are capped by the publication of his celebrated historical analy-
sis of industrial capitalism, The Great Transformation, in 1944. Only after this
point did Polanyi secure permanent academic posts in the United States, first
at Bennington College, then Columbia University. From there, Polanyi wrote
or contributed to a number of academic articles and books focused largely on
issues of ancient economic anthropology.
It is striking how different Polanyi’s writing is during each of these periods,
speaking to different audiences with different aims, often using the vocabulary
of different disciplines. On this basis, a case could perhaps be made for attempt-
ing to divide one’s presentation of his work biographically, into distinct phases
of output, emphasizing the situatedness of each period with the associated
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christopher holmes
intellectual terms of debate. Yet this would give a somewhat artificial picture,
because common interests and strains of argumentation weave across these
periods. Moreover, such an approach would discourage comparison between
the varied ways in which Polanyi articulated key ideas over time, which is
arguably one of the most intellectually productive ways of examining his work.
Reflecting these points, many of the chapters in this book explicitly attempt
to connect the dots between Polanyi’s different periods of output, identifying
both key continuities, and key changes, in his views. Some of these take the
form of innovative arguments about well-known issues of interest: international
political economy, the gold standard, commodification, etc., while others piece
together a picture of Polanyi’s thought on less well-appreciated themes such as
knowledge and money theory.
This polymathism leads to a second reason: such is the success of Polanyi’s
conceptual contributions to scholarship that parts of it now feature in the stand-
ard lexicon of thought in a variety of social scientific disciplines. With that
success has come a variety of different perspectives on its strengths and its weak-
nesses. Some of this variety can be traced to a not inconsiderable amount of
ambiguity in Polanyi’s formulation of key ideas, but it is also due to the fact that
there are a series of ongoing debates within the community of Polanyi scholars
on a variety of questions, including the proper interpretation of key concepts,
the degree of importance one should assign to other traditions of thought in
understanding his ideas (particularly neoclassical economics and Marxism),
the relationship between his early political economy and his later anthropology
and the extent to which his ideas can be translated into contemporary contexts
meaningfully. Rather than seeing these as debates that can be settled “once and
for all”, one should see them as indicative of strength in the Polanyian tradition.
This book as a whole, in which his thought is relayed by thirteen leading experts
in the field, avoids closing down any of these questions. Instead, it provides the
reader with a wide range of perspectives on them, inviting the reader to formu-
late their own views.
This relates to the third, and most important reason why one should not
search for an overly unified picture of Polanyi’s work. This is that, beyond ques-
tions of interpretation, critique of Polanyi’s work itself has become intrinsic to
the tradition of Polanyian thought. A considerable proportion of the many aca-
demic articles and books devoted to applying Polanyi’s ideas to contemporary
issues are hedged with caveats about the limitations of his conceptual scheme,
or the ways in which it should be altered or refined. Many authors ostensibly
sympathetic to Polanyi’s normative aims and/or some of his broad analytical
insights, have found the power of his work to depend precisely on engaging,
rather than avoiding, its difficulties, ambiguities and inconsistencies.
The essentiality of critique to the Polanyian tradition is abundantly
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