Easing myself into the week with a bit of browsing, this review by Michael McCarthy in The Boston Review of a new book about Karl Polanyi piqued my interest. The book is [amazon_link id=”0674050711″ target=”_blank” ]The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique[/amazon_link] by Fred Block and Margaret Somers.

[amazon_image id=”0674050711″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique[/amazon_image]

As stated in the review, I wholeheartedly agree with the Polanyi perspective on markets: “Polanyi’s key work, [amazon_link id=”080705643X” target=”_blank” ]The Great Transformation[/amazon_link], demonstrates that markets and states are not separate entities, which each have their own unique and endogenous dynamics, but instead are inescapably intertwined and mutually constitutive.” Yet when I first read[amazon_link id=”080705643X” target=”_blank” ]The Great Transformation[/amazon_link] – some time in the mid-1980s – it irritated me enormously. I can’t remember why, and my brief notes on the book give no clue, but I do remember the emotion. So I’ve hauled it off my bookshelf and will have to re-read it, to find out why and whether it still has the same effect.

The review of the Block and Somers book, alluding to Albert Hirschman’s [amazon_link id=”067476868X” target=”_blank” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction[/amazon_link], makes it sound as though they are in effect arguing that there is a performative aspect to ‘free markets’: “Block and Somers’s unique contribution is to argue that these public narratives about the economy are key drivers of regulatory policy…. markets are not only embedded socially and politically; markets are also embedded in ideas.” Again, something I would agree with. One of the quotations I jotted down in my brief notes from [amazon_link id=”080705643X” target=”_blank” ]The Great Transformation[/amazon_link] is: “The introduction of free markets, far from doing away with the need for control, regulation and intervention, enormously increased their range.”

[amazon_image id=”080705643X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”067476868X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy[/amazon_image]