Polanyi, Karl (1886–1964)

Abstract

Karl Paul Polanyi was born in Vienna in 1886, received his doctoral degree in Budapest in 1912, and ended his career at Columbia University lecturing in economic history and coordinating research into the origin of economic institutions. The major question of Polanyi's substantive view is how to identify the place of economies in societies. Embeddedness, according to Polanyi, is related to the fact that an economic actor is a social being, with a mixture of motives, serving to attain social recognition and social goods. Economy can therefore be interpreted as processes of production, transport, transactions, and disposition. Institutions lend unity and stability to these processes, which can be studied via the forms of integration: reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange. Markets are integrated into a dominant system only in exceptional historical cases. Substantivism became a chapter in the history of sociology and anthropology; Polanyi's embeddedness concept is a point of reference in economic sociology. Polanyi also influenced research on state and economy as well as socialist and postsocialist studies.