Polanyi, Hayek and embedded neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Written originally on the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, this article critically analyses how the ideas of Hayek and Polanyi have been deployed to understand neoliberalism. It argues that dominant scholarly interpretations tend to miss the significance of each thinker to an understanding of neoliberalism, as well as some of the key dynamics of neoliberal forms of capitalist regulation. Drawing upon the work of Polanyi, the article advances the concept of embedded neoliberalism. From the 1970s neoliberal regulations became deeply embedded in a series of institutions, class relations and ideological norms. This helps to explain both the durability of neoliberalism, and the onset of crisis in 2008. In this context, Hayek’s ideas are best understood as providing a malleable set of concepts underpinning neoliberal ideology, rather than the chief causal agent in the neoliberal transformation of states and economies.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalism
• embeddedness
• neoliberalism
• Polanyi
• Hayek

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Damien Cahill

Damien Cahill is Associate Professor in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. His publications include Neoliberalism (with Martijn Konings, Polity Press, 2017) and The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism (Edward Elgar, 2014).