Gareth Dale

Karl Polanyi (eBook, ePUB)

A Life on the Left

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was one of the twentieth century's most original interpreters of the market economy. His penetrating analysis of globalization's disruptions and the Great Depression's underlying causes still serves as an effective counterargument to free market fundamentalism. This biography shows how the major personal and historical events of his life transformed him from a bourgeois radical into a Christian socialist but also informed his ambivalent stance on social democracy, communism, the New Deal, and the shifting intellectual scene of postwar America.

The book begins with Polanyi's childhood in the Habsburg Empire and his involvement with the Great War and Hungary's postwar revolution. It connects Polanyi's idealistic radicalism to the political promise and intellectual ferment of Red Vienna and the horror of fascism. The narrative revisits Polanyi's oeuvre in English, German, and Hungarian, includes exhaustive research in five archives, and features interviews with Polanyi's daughter, students, and colleagues, clarifying the contradictory aspects of the thinker's work. These personal accounts also shed light on Polanyi's connections to scholars, Christians, atheists, journalists, hot and cold warriors, and socialists of all stripes. Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left engages with Polanyi's biography as a reflection and condensation of extraordinary times. It highlights the historical ruptures, tensions, and upheavals that the thinker sought to capture and comprehend and, in telling his story, engages with the intellectual and political history of a turbulent epoch.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Columbia University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 31. Mai 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780231541480
• Artikelnr.: 49432933

Autorenporträt

Gareth Dale is senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Brunel University, London. His other books include Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Hungarian Writings (2016), and Green Growth: Ideology, Political Economy, and the Alternatives (2016).

Inhaltsangabe

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 conomicus 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.

Rezensionen

"Gareth Dale's book is the most erudite and theoretically comprehensive account of Polanyi's ideas that I have come across. This is above all an exercise in intertextuality and as such it is a remarkable example of intellectual dialogue." -- Keith Hart, Goldsmiths, University of London

"This will likely become the definitive book on Polanyi. In fact, it should be regarded and promoted as the definitive exposition of Polanyi's vision, ideas and the attendant debates. Gareth Dale combines a respectful and duly admiring attitude with unassailable theoretical erudition and clear-headed sobriety. The book also stands on its own as a serious contribution to current ideological debates and scholarly controversies regarding the prospects of post capitalist transitions." -- Georgi Derluguian, Northwestern University

Gareth Dale's new biography offers us a bracing reminder of a far richer world of socialist activity that once existed in much of the West. Nikil Saval, The Nation