Karl Polanyi's Environmental Sociology

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 10. Theory

Abstract

Drawing upon The Great Transformation (1944), we outline Karl Polanyi’s environmental sociology by presenting his major insights on economic substantivism, fictitious commodities, and double movements. Polanyi wrote his opus in challenge to Von Mises’ Austrian School of Economics and its pursuit of an autonomous, self-regulating global free market. Polanyi’s recognized the social and environmental limits of a fully free market and reasoned that inevitable market excesses would result in the rise of society self-protection to preserve land along with labor and money. We believe Polanyi’s insights make him an important classical contributor to environmental sociology on par with Robert Malthus, Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. We conclude by outlining possible connections to established environmental sociology theories and literatures.

Authors

• Steven R. Brechin, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers

• Weston Henry Fenner, Syracuse University