Polanyi Marx

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KARL POLANYI AND THE WRITING OF THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION Paper presented at the Eight International Karl Polanyi Conference “Economy and Democracy”. Mexico City, November 2001. Fred Block Department of Sociology University of California, Davis I am deeply grateful to Ana Gomez and Margie Mendell for assistance with the Karl Polanyi archive. Many of the arguments of this paper emerged out of dialogue with Margie Mendell, Kari Polanyi-Levitt and Margaret Somers. Nicole Biggart, Peter Evans, Frances Fox Piven, Michael Peter Smith, and Margaret Somers made valuable comments on earlier drafts. Abstract Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book, The Great Transformation, has been recognized as central for the field of economic sociology, but it has not been subject to the same theoretical scrutiny of other classic works in the field. This is a particular problem in that there are central tensions and complexities in Polanyi’s formulations. This paper argues that these tensions can be understood as a consequence of Polanyi’s changing relationship to Marxism. The basic outline of the book was developed in England in the late 1930's when Polanyi was working explicitly within a Marxist framework. However, as he was writing the book, he developed several concepts that distanced him from Marxism including the idea of fictitious commodities and the embedded economy. Since circumstances did not give him the time to revise his manuscript, the book is marked by a tension between these different moments in his own theoretical development. The result is that Polanyi in The Great Transformation glimpses the idea of the always embedded market economy, but he does not name it or elaborate it.

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After years of relative obscurity, Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation1. It was reissued as a paperback in 1957 and in a slightly reversion version in 2001. (Hereafter abbreviated as GT) is increasingly recognized as one of the major works of 20th century social science. It is an...