Polanyi for the Age of Trump

Abstract

t is no exaggeration to say that Fred Block andMargaret Somers are almost singlehandedly responsible for reviving interest in Karl Polanyi’s intellectual and political legacy in American sociology. Their contribution has consisted not only in reminding sociologists of the power of Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of market society tomake sense of our troubled times but evenmore importantly in resolvingmany of the difficult theoretical tangles that Polanyi gets himself into in the course of developing this analysis. Now their various essays, written over three decades, have been revised for publication in a single volume, supplemented with several new essays that introduce novel themes and also attempt to apply Polanyi’s conceptual apparatus to current social and political problems. As a compilation of essays, the resulting volume defies easy summary—and I won’t attempt to offer a full treatment of the many important contributions that run through these chapters. An incomplete inventory would include the masterful exegesis of the complex argument of The Great Transformation presented in chapter 2; chapter 5’s valuable reexamination of the Speenhamland period in English social history; and a highly original, Polanyian-inspired consideration of free market ideology as a genre of utopian social theory, which is elaborated in chapter 4 but runs as a theme throughout the book. Alongside these contributions, I want to give special emphasis to two conceptual innovations that underpin Block and Somers’s entire analysis and I think represent their most enduring legacy to Polanyian scholarship: namely, their notion of the “always embedded economy” and the closely related concept of “ideational embeddedness.” But since my role as reviewer is not merely to praise but also to offer a critique, after introducing these concepts, I will take is-