Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/11638
Title: In search of Karl Polanyi’s international relations theory
Authors: Dale, G
Keywords: Karl Polanyi;International politics;World order;1910 - 1940
Issue Date: 2015
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Citation: Review of International Studies, pp. 1 - 24, (2015)
Abstract: Karl Polanyi is principally known as an economic historian and a theorist of international political economy. His theses are commonly encountered in debates concerning globalisation, regionalism, regulation and deregulation, and neoliberalism. But the standard depiction of his ideas is based upon a highly restricted corpus of his work: essentially, his published writings, in English, from the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing upon a broader range of Polanyi’s work in Hungarian, German, and English, this article examines his less well-known analyses of international politics and world order. It sketches the main lineaments of Polanyi’s international thought from the 1910s until the mid-1940s, charting his evolution from Wilsonian liberal, via debates within British pacifism, towards a position close to E. H. Carr’s realism. It reconstructs the dialectic of universalism and regionalism in Polanyi’s prospectus for postwar international order, with a focus upon his theory of ‘tame empires’ and its extension by neo-Polanyian theorists of the ‘new regionalism’ and European integration. It explores the tensions and contradictions in Polanyi’s analysis, and, finally, it hypothesises that the failure of his postwar predictions provides a clue as to why his research on international relations dried up in the 1950s.
URI: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/11638
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0260210515000273
ISSN: 0260-2105
1469-9044
Appears in Collections:Dept of Social and Political Sciences Research Papers

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