ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that a reconstruction of Karl Polanyi’s social theory can provide contemporary scholars with powerful tools for analysing the last two centuries of capitalist development and for understanding the prospects and possibilities in the current historical moment. Polanyi is similar to his two great predecessors: Karl Marx and Max Weber. From the Enlightenment onwards, there has been a deep conflict between the project of political modernity defined as collective self-determination and economic modernity defined as the autonomous determination of the ways in which human needs are satisfied. Managing the fictitious commodities requires both an ongoing and active involvement of the state and complex combinations of market and non-market elements. This insight suggests that much of our historical understanding of economic modernity is inadequate and misleading. The major theories of modernity — including market liberalism and Marxism — have agreed that there is a deep conflict between economic modernity and political modernity.
