Books
Description from publisher:
What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ideology of our time.
Polanyi contends that the free market championed by market liberals never actually existed. While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide such necessities of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods are subjected to market principles, social life is threatened and major crises ensue.
Despite these theoretical flaws, market principles are powerfully seductive because they promise to diminish the role of politics in civic and social life. But like Marx’s theory that communism will lead to a “withering away of the State,” the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous.
Preface ix
1 Karl Polanyi and the Power of Ideas 1
2 Beyond the Economistic Fallacy 44
3 Karl Polanyi and the Writing of The Great Transformation 73
4 Turning the Tables: Polanyi’s Critique of Free Market Utopianism 98
5 In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law 114
7 The Enduring Strength of Free Market Conservatism in the United States 193
Notes 241
Bibliography 253
INTERVIEWS RE THE POWER OF MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM
Farrell, Henry. 2014. “The Free Market Is an Impossible Utopia.” The Washington Post, July 18.
Hirschman, Dan. 2014. "Q&A with Fred Block & Margaret Somers on The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Harvard 2014)." Accounts: Newsletter of the Section on Economic Sociology, American Sociological Association 13:3 (July).
SHORT ARTICLES RELATED TO THE POWER OF MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM
Somers, Margaret R. and Fred Block. 2014. "The Return of Karl Polanyi." Dissent Magazine, Spring.
Somers, Margaret R. and Fred Block. 2014. "Is Cruelty the Key to Prosperity?" openDemocracy.net, October 27.
SELECTED COMMENTARIES AND REVIEWS
Kuttner, Robert. 2014. "Karl Polanyi Explains It All." The American Prospect, April 15.
Little, Daniel. 2014. "Polanyi's Substantive Theory of a Decent Society." Understanding Society: Innovative Thinking about the Social World, June 5.
Monbiot, George. 2015. "Skivers and Strivers: This 200-year-old Myth Won’t Die." The Guardian, June 23.
Poggi, Gianfranco. 2014. "Discussing Karl Polanyi: Understanding the Current Crisis." Books and Ideas/La Vie des Idees (booksandideas.net), December 11.
Cambridge University Press, 2008
(Korean Translation: Greenbee Publishing 2012.)
Winner of the 2009 Giovanni Sartori Award in Qualitative Methodology, American Political Science Association. The award “honors Giovanni Sartori's work on qualitative methods and concept formation, and problems of context for concepts in new spatial and temporal settings. The award is intended to encompass both new research on methodology as well as substantive work that is an exemplar for the application of qualitative methods.”
Description from publisher:
As global governance is increasingly driven by market fundamentalism, growing numbers of citizens have become socially excluded and internally stateless. Against this movement to organize society exclusively by market principles, Margaret Somers argues that socially inclusive democratic rights must be counter-balanced by the powers of a social state, a robust public sphere and a relationally-sturdy civil society. Through epistemologies of history and naturalism, contested narratives of social capital, and Hurricane Katrina's racial apartheid, she warns that the growing authority of the market is distorting the non-contractualism of citizenship; rights, inclusion and moral worth are increasingly dependent on contractual market value. In this pathbreaking work, Somers advances an innovative view of rights as public goods rooted in an alliance of public power, political membership, and social practices of equal moral recognition - the right to have rights.
Table of Contents and Front Matter
Part I: Citizenship imperiled: how marketization creates social exclusion, statelessness, and rightlessness
1 Theorizing citizenship rights and statelessness 1
Part II: Historical epistemologies of citizenship: rights, civil society, and the public sphere
4 Citizenship troubles: genealogies of struggle for the soul of the social 147
Part III: In search of civil society and democratic citizenship: romancing the market, reviling the state
6 Let them eat social capital: how marketizing the social turned Solidarity into a bowling team 213
References 289
Index 332
SELECTED COMMENTARIES AND REVIEWS
Katz, Michael B., Bill Maurer, and Erik Olin Wright. 2011. Review Symposium on Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right To Have Rights by Margaret R. Somers (Cambridge University Press 2008). Socio-Economic Review 9:2 (April), 395–418.
Wright, Erik Olin, Saskia Sassen, Michael Tolley, and Margaret Somers. 2011. Book Symposium on Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right To Have Rights by Margaret R. Somers (Cambridge University Press 2008). Trajectories: Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section 22:2 (Spring), 8-34.