Abstract
This article evaluates Polanyi’s work from two complementary theoretical perspectives: moral economy and cultural political economy. Polanyi’s comparative historical analyses of substantive economies, their modes of distribution and the bases for their respective kinds of relative unity and stability, the rise of the market economy in and through its disembedding from more encompassing social relations, the social bases and motives for resistance to this disembedding, and its subsequent re-embedding in a market society are major theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of moral economies. Polanyi’s work can also be explored for insights that anticipate the emerging post-disciplinary approach of cultural political economy, which combines critical semiotic analysis and the critique of political economy. More importantly, cultural political economy provides new theoretical and methodological tools for elaborating Polanyi’s brilliant insights into moral economy.
Highlights
Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag werden Polanyis Arbeiten aus zwei komplementären theoretischen Perspektiven bewertet: moralische Ökonomie und kulturelle
If any, would claim that Polanyi employed even implicitly critical semiotic analysis. His anthropological and historical analyses did explore the role of language in the development of civilization, the genealogy of a specialized economic vocabulary, changing social and economic imaginaries, different economic projects, and the language and motives of mobilized in justifying and resisting the market economy
Mutual adjustment means that “society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws. [...] [For] a market economy can function only in a market society” (Polanyi 2001, p. 60)
Summary
Moral economy does not restrict its object of inquiry to particular epochs, modes of distribution or production, or social groups (Booth 1994; Sayer 2007; Götz 2015; Palomera and Vetta 2016). As well as its role in historical and comparative analysis, this typology enables Polanyi to show that monetary gain is not vital to distribution and trade This is a further contribution to undermining the “economistic fallacy” that rests on a transhistorical model that treats market exchange as primordial and universal.. For once the economic system is organized in separate institutions, based on specific motives and conferring a special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws This is the meaning of the familiar assertion that a market economy can function only in a market society It is unclear at this stage in his argument whether this refers to the apogee of selfregulating markets in the 19th century as they were disembedded from their earlier institutional frameworks, thereby enabling laissez-faire principles to be instituted on a society-wide basis with the result that “the running of society is an adjunct to the market” (Polanyi 2001, p. 60); or it refers to the process whereby the society that is being forced to adapt and reorganize in this way starts to “fight back” by demanding new social institutions that can constrain market forces and compensate for market failures
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