Introduction

Economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi (1944) argued in his The great transformation that not only should markets not be left alone to ‘selfregulate’, but that in the long term they could not function by themselves. If the state did not step into their operation and if other institutional forces and collectivities were not engaged for social and community enhancement, markets would not allocate resources efficiently. The market would fail comprehensively unless it was regulated by the state and influenced by non-commercially interested actors. Polanyi agreed with Robert Owen, who argued that the ‘market economy if left to evolve according to its own laws would create great and permanent evils.’ Focusing on both humans and nature, Polanyi (1944, p 130) saw that ‘leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them.’ According to him, the saving grace for both the market and society was that market forces alone did not produce capitalism. The evolution of capitalist production was marked by a ‘double movement’ (emphasis added):

Here Polanyi's contribution to the social science of political economy, and the analysis of global markets in particular, outlived him (North, 1977; Stanfield, 1980; Block and Somers, 1984). His ideas on market regulation had much salience in the context of financial crisis in the late 1990s (Bugra and Agartan, 2007; Harvey et al, 2007) and the deeper downturn that began in 2008 but had its roots in much earlier financial market trends (Begg, 2008; Halliday, 2008). Polanyi is also applicable to developments in the global education market.