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Karl Polanyi and Return of the “Primitive” in Institutional Economics

In the wake of the neoliberal policies of the 1980s, a new wave of interest has grown in Karl Polanyi's work as a source of inspiration for a new theoretical and social countermovement. Within this context, Polanyi's work has been gradually incorporated into the body of institutional economics. Therefore, this work does not aspire to represent Polanyi's main line of argument or its policy implications, what it purports to achieve instead, is to bring to light a basic supporting structure of Polanyi's thought that has until now remained in the dark. The idea of progress was of central importance to what Polanyi called the "nineteenth century civilization" (Polanyi 1944,3). We also know that the nineteenth-century civilization dragged its feet well into the twentieth century, and Polanyi was writing The Great Transformation (1944) very much against the habits of thought characteristic of the social sciences that bore its imprint. As such, the questioning of this basic idea of progress was fundamentally important for Polanyi's work and constitutes one of several important themes of the book. This paper chooses to focus on this single hitherto neglected theme that is of utmost importance for institutional economists as well. At least one institutional economist has already asked if institutional economics is an economics of progress and stated that "there exists more than an ambiguity about the topic in the work of institutional economists" the origins of which are traceable to Clarence Ayres's highly debatable reinterpretation of Thorstein B. Veblen's work (Miller 1992, 115). Polanyi loudly objected to the uncritical acceptance of the idea of progress by often referring to his mainstream adversaries within the social sciences as "dogmatic