INTRODUCTION

Karl Polanyi’s critique of the market economy has over recent decades attracted much attention, in the context of debates over “market society” and neoliberalism. Less consideration has been paid, however, to his political theory, including his understanding of “the state”. Although the interrelations among politics, the economy and society always occupied the centre of his analysis, it is true that there is little in his oeuvre that directly addresses the state. His focus, Michael Burawoy remarks, was “not politics and the bourgeois revolution but economics and the market revolution, not the formation of a national bourgeoisie but the formation of national markets”. His thesis that the origins of the “cataclysm” (the wars and economic crises of the early to mid-twentieth century) “lay in the utopian endeavour of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system” implies no less than “that the balance of power, the gold standard, and the liberal state … were, in the last resort, shaped in one common matrix, the self-regulating market”. The liberal state, for Polanyi, was one of the four defining institutions of nineteenth-century civilization, alongside the balance of power system, the gold standard and the self-regulating market (“the common matrix”). Of these, the state is the one to which he devotes the least analysis. Despite its role in shaping the other three, it gains no systematic or separate attention. Rather, sporadic observations are sprinkled throughout The Great Transformation, most of which elaborate the same idea of the allegedly non-intervening, liberal state.

But this is not the end of the story. For Polanyi, as for Marx, the understanding of the modern state as an institutional correlate of the market economy (in Polanyi’s case) or of the mode of production (in Marx’s) was only one angle among many. Just as from Marx’s reflections and historical, philosophical and journalistic remarks on the state at least six approaches can be sifted out, according to Bob Jessop, so too in Polanyi’s writings various perspectives emerge. These were developed during the different historical conjunctures in which he wrote, and serve distinct arguments concerning state–economy and state–society relations.