SOAN Colloquium: Talk about Karl Polanyi

*New location: Johnson Center #240A, Paul Robeson Room.*

Sociology Professor Johanna Bockman will give a talk titled "Karl Polanyi, the Welfare State, and Socialism." After Michel Foucault, Karl Polanyi is one of the most popular theorist among social scientists today. Scholars have used Polanyi’s work to study the economy in new ways, moving beyond economists’ assumptions of homo economicus and markets as isolated or disembedded from social institutions to recognizing the economy as a social space of networks and institutions. Polanyi’s framework has been mobilized to understand Keynesianism as embedded liberalism and neoliberalism as disembedded liberalism. Polanyi’s notion of the “double movement” has suggested that political resistance will always emerge to meet market fundamentalism, though it was unclear to Polanyi whether this resistance will lead to socialism or fascism. In reaction to neoliberal disembedding since the early 1980s, similar to that described by Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944), innumerable social scientists have relied on Polanyi in their arguments that free markets are socially impossible and that government intervention is, in fact, necessary to have a functioning economy and avoid economic crisis, thus arguing for a form of Keynesianism. 

In her talk, Professor Bockman will discuss how Polanyi's work went far beyond Keynesianism to advocate for a radical form of socialism. According to Bockman, scholars have not adequately understood what Polanyi meant by his critique of free markets and his advocacy of embeddedness because they have primarily relied upon The Great Transformation, a foundational critique of the market society in which we live. She will discuss her collaborative work translating Karl Polanyi's 1922 article "Socialist Accounting," which will be published in Theory and Society and which reveals his vision of socialism. 

Please RSVP for this event.