INTRODUCTION
Many have rightly lauded the singular character and enduring relevance of the work of Karl Polanyi, specifically his best-known book, The Great Transformation (hereafter TGT). In TGT, Polanyi attributes the dissolution of nineteenth-century European internationalism and an extended period of geopolitical violence and protectionism lasting from 1914 to 1944 (the year the book was first published) to what he refers to as the “stark utopia” of international market self-regulation. Polanyi's analysis has been celebrated – in some cases by commentators with sharply contrasting views– as one highly relevant to late twentieth-century liberal globalization qua international capitalism and to the associated rise of, and resistance to, neoliberalism as both an intellectual movement and political project.
Among the unique and important features of Polanyi's analysis in TGT is an “ecological” moment of his critique of market self-regulation. Polanyi specifically argues that land (that is, nature) was one of three (along with money and labour) species of “fictitious” commodity, focal points of political contestation in societal “double movements” pushing for and against market liberalism and unfettered commodification. In a paper that serves in large measure as the inspiration for this chapter, Nancy Fraser argues that Polanyi's ecological critique of free-market capitalism helps make his work both singular within the political economy tradition and highly relevant in the current planetary conjuncture (Fraser 2014). As she puts it:
[TGT] interweaves an account of financial breakdown and economic collapse with accounts of natural despoliation and social disintegration … Refusing to limit himself either to the economic, on the one hand, or to the ecological, on the other, Polanyi elaborated a conception of crisis that encompasses both those dimensions, as well as the dimension of social reproduction.
(Fraser 2014: 543)Although she recognizes the importance and enduring relevance of Polanyi's unified economic– ecological– sociological critique, Fraser nevertheless raises important questions and concerns about how Polanyi might be and has been interpreted. One of her specific worries pertains to whether or not his argument lends itself to what she called an “ontological interpretation” – that is, an essentially dualistic framework in which nature is understood to comprise a domain wholly external to society, culture and human history more generally.
