Karl Polanyi, a Republican?

Abstract

Both Karl Polanyi and his work have been described with various adjectives like “democratic Socialist”, “social humanist”, “left liberal”, and “left Christian”. All of these adjectives could be right because his biography was indeed influenced by all these theories.This paper seeks to contribute to this debate, suggesting that Polanyi’s work contains some elements that could be heirs of the Republican tradition and, in particular, of its most democratic and progressive side. Such relation becomes clearer when we analyze his conceptions about “liberty”, “democracy”, “justice”, and “market”. More specifically, this paper focuses on one of these coincidences, namely, a similar view about freedom and property. This link can be revealed throughout the parallelisms between the Polanyi’s work and those of other authors like Aristotle, Robespierre, Paine, and Marx. Although Karl Polanyi’s work cannot be totally placed into the tradition of Republicanism, it could be seen as a substantial contribution to this thought, offering some relevant thesis and empirical arguments to analyze the relation between markets and societies, and more precisely, pointing out some arrangements of market design that could be fruitful for the democratic Republican theory. The paper concludes with the idea that such analysis could provide us useful intellectual tools, which can be helpful for the current scientific and political debates.

Key words: republicanism, Karl Polanyi, material independence, institutional design, freedom, market system.