Dani Rodrik: Karl Polanyi and Globalization’s Wrong Turn

POLANYI LECTURES 2019

In April and May of 2019, the Department of Socioeconomics at WU Vienna organised the Polanyi Lectures, which were part of the framework program of the International Karl Polanyi Conference 2019. The lectures, co-organized  by the Institute for Multi-Level Governance and Development, welcomed:

  • Dani Rodrik, economist and Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, 
  • Jamie Peck, Canada Research Chair in Urban & Regional Political Economy, Distinguished University Scholar, and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and
  • Marguerite Mendell, Director of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy Montreal.

In his lecture ‘Karl Polanyi and Globalization’s Wrong Turn’, Dani Rodrik argues: 

“Globalization took a wrong turn when it overlooked Polanyi’s central insight that markets need to be embedded in institutions, both for effectiveness and legitimacy. The brief period of Bretton Woods-style globalization in the decades following World War II was more Polanyiesque in so far it did not question the centrality of national economic management and regulation. Constructing a viable globalization will require going back to that central insight, though the results are unlikely to look much like the Bretton Woods regime.”

You can watch the full lecture here or read the transcript of the lecture below (PDF) : 

Further Links: 
Dani Rodrik: Karl Polanyi and Globalization’s wrong turn – Transcript of the lecture (PDF)
Read the excerpt of Rodrik’s talk in the IWM Post, the Magazine of the Institute for Human Sciences (p. 10) 
Detailed Program Polanyi Lectures (PDF)
Karl Polanyi und die falsche Wende der Globalisierung – Paulo Freire Institute Austria 
(German only)