Gianfranco Poggi — Discussing Karl Polanyi, Understanding the Current Crisis

Reviewed: Fred Block & Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, Harvard University Press 2014.…

More or less self-consciously, all “polanyians” argue from a critical posture vis-a-vis the structures and processes dominant within contemporary Western societies. To that extent, they share a position on the left with a larger collectivity of scholars dealing with social and historical phenomena most of whom, instead, derive their intellectual inspiration from this or that component of the Marxian legacy. These scholars in turn disagree widely from one another, but basically share a (at best) diffident attitude toward Polanyi, due chiefly to a critical contrast between the understandings of “society” held respectively by Marx and by Polanyi. 

From Marx’s standpoint, society is no more than the site of the hostile confrontation between the conflicting economic interests of two historically variable groups – freemen and slaves in antiquity, lords and serfs under feudalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat under capitalism. Societal dynamics revolves around the exploitation of the second element within each relation by the first. Under rare and momentous historical circumstances, an existent mode of exploitation is subverted and replaced by another mode. 

Polanyi of course shared Marx’s emphasis on these developments, but challenged their absolute prominence attributed to them in his view of the social process, focused almost exclusively on the unique historical experience of the West. Thus, in Polanyi’s judgment Marx was insufficiently aware of the huge diversity of non-Western arrangements for material production and of their relationship with other significant aspects of the social process. 

For Polanyi, “society” is a complex reality constituted by relatively autonomous sets of diverse institutional arrangements, varying widely in time and space, some of which address concerns of no immediate economic significance. They generate and validate similarities and contrasts between individuals and between groups that may override - or any rate frame and constrain, rather than masking or justifying - the relations regarding their economic interests and the resulting collective identities. 

Block and Somers’ entire book can be considered as a sustained exploration and elaboration of this key motif in Polanyi’s thinking, the so-called ‘embedding’ of the economic aspect of the social process within a pre-existent, more complex matrix. Their concluding chapter is entitled “The reality of society” and places this notion at the core of what they label Polanyi’s “new public philosophy”.…

Books & Ideas
Discussing Karl Polanyi, Understanding the Current Crisis
Gianfranco Poggi | Professor of Sociology at University of Trento, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia and European University Institute
h/t Mark Thoma at Economist's View