Beyond Theodicy?

I begin this final chapter by thinking along with Karl Polanyi about alternatives to the programs of action and inaction central to the economic theology documented across this book. I often turn to Polanyi. ¹ He is attentive to the way the social trauma of the industrial revolution motivated both the elaboration of a “Liberal Creed” and a movement to protect society and nature from the consequences of attempting to implement that utopian vision of self-regulating markets. Though his notion of a counter-movement can be read as overly mechanical, ² I see it differently. Polanyi describes these movements as varying and often only loosely connected responses, but all grounded in norms of reciprocity and responsibility for community well-being that reflect the reality of humans as social beings. Instead of a utopian design, an ethics of societal self-protection draws on the experience of modes of life worked out over the long expanse of human history, including in response to the rise of market society. By contrast, the Liberal Creed offers a utopian project grounded in a vision of natural necessity and teleological promise that requires both upending long-standing practices of human reciprocity and natural stewardship and deflecting countervailing efforts to restrict free markets. This critique of creedal economics inspires us to recover ways of being, knowing and doing informed by practices of reciprocity within human community and between humans and their non-human kin. Polanyi ties this recovery of reciprocity to a realization of a human freedom that is cognizant of its own socialization, the limits of its mastery over the world, including a recognition of human mortality, and its debts to others. He sees his idea of freedom as growing out of religious thinking and feeling, though clearly opposed to the religious understandings of the Liberal Creed. I present Polanyi’s argument and its implications in the first section of this chapter.