Contradiction and Conflict Around the Market and Work: A Political Reading of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation

Abstract

n this article we attempt to investigate the place of politics to the emergence of a liberal market economy in Polanyi’s theoretical framework. For this author, the capitalist economy, organized completely on the base of free market, has radically separated from other social institutions, forcing the rest of society to function subject to their own laws. This situation involved the organization of society above its fictional form of work, and in opposition to this, the emergence of a protectionist movement that embraces the workforce of the ravages of such fiction. The key point for Polanyi is that this double movement is highly contradictory due to the fact that the inevitable and necessary emergence of this self-defense of society, while protecting the human substance of society, it becomes incompatible with the self-regulating market system, placing society in an institutional deadlock.