From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization

• In Event: 437 - Section on Economic Sociology Invited Session. The Great Transformation (1944) Turns Seventy: Looking Backward and Looking Forward

Abstract

The Great Financialization has created a triple crisis: social, political,
and ecological. The Keynesian social contract which gave us three decades
of inclusive growth disintegrated in the 1970s. Hayek succeeded in turning
the doctrinal clock back to the neoclassical economics before the Keynesian
revolution, and the ideology of freedom as free enterprise continues to
sustain the neoliberal counterrevolution. Six years after the financial
crisis of 2008, financial markets have captured governments in North
America and Europe, democracy is in suspense, automation is destroying
decent employment, inequality of wealth and economic power is
unprecedented, and climate change is not addressed. Polanyi's historical
and anthropological critique of market economy and market society takes us
beyond the debate of stimulus vs. austerity. His work shifts the discourse
from the economism of the current right and left to an understanding that
ultimately, a sustainable economy must rest on a solidaristic and cohesive
social base. We are reminded of Polanyi's prediction in the opening passage
of The Great Transformation, that unregulated capitalism "could not exist
for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance
of society."

Author

• Kari Polanyi Levitt, McGill University