Gareth Dale 
Karl Polanyi [PDF ebook] 
The Limits of the Market

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally
acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic
history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the
current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its
critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as
a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a
prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes
and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s.

Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first
comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It
assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared
during his spells in American academia – but also his
journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and
lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It
provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great
Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal
writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient
and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its
primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter,
Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own
published and unpublished writings in English and German.

This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking
will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences,
providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current
economic crisis.

Cuprins

Preface.

Abbreviations.

Introduction.

Karl Polanyi for the neoliberal age.

Individual responsibility and the quest for community.

Some systemically satanic features of capitalism.

From civilizational breakdown to neoliberalism.

Chapter 1: The economics and ethics of socialism.

Responsibility and ‘overview’: the socialist accounting
debate.

Critique and rejoinder.

The subjugation of moral ends to economic means.

Towards a synthesis of Communism and Christianity.

Chapter 2: The Great Transformation.

The Liberal Century: contradictions of a golden age.

Birth of the market economy.

Malthus, Ricardo and Speenhamland.

Marketization and its backwash.

Disruptive strains and the end of elasticity.

The originality of The Great Transformation.

Some criticisms of the conceptual framework.

Some criticisms of the historical argument.

Chapter 3: The descent of Economic Man.

From homo oeconomicus to homo communisticus.

The debate over methods.

From marginalism to formalism.

Two meanings of economic.

Mechanisms of integration.

Inconsistencies and ambiguities.

The formalist rejoinder.

Marxist interpositions.

The debate scatters and dissolves.

Chapter 4: Trade, markets and money in archaic
societies.

Introduction: the oikos debate.

‘Primitive’ and archaic trade, markets and money.

Ancient Mesopotamia: three theses.

Mesopotamia: evaluation and critique.

Trade and markets in Bronze and Iron Age Greece.

Greece: evaluation and critique.

West Africa: Dahomey, Whydah and Tivland.

Dahomey and the Tiv: evaluation and critique.

From Meso-America to rural India via the Berber Highlands.

Conclusion.

Chapter 5: ‘Disembedded’ and ‘always embedded’
economies.

Embeddedness: a genealogy.

Further adventures of a concept.

Embeddedness and decommodification in the mid-twentieth
century.

Chapter 6: ‘At the brink of a great transformation?’
Neoliberalism and the countermovement today.

Explaining the neoliberal ascendancy.

Alternative futures: participatory planning and the mixed
economy.

No dearth of countermovements.

Pendular forces.

The Great Oscillation.

In place of a conclusion: thoughts on the current
predicament.

Conclusion.

A liberal anti-Communist?

A Marxist? A Romantic?

Tribute and critique.

Notes.

References.

Index.

Despre autor

Gareth Dale is a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University