The iron law of democratic socialism: British and Austrian influences on the young Karl Polanyi

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.A central thesis of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation concerns the tensions between capitalism and democracy: the former embodies the principle of inequality, while democracy represents that of equality. This paper explores the intellectual heritage of this thesis, in the ‘functional theory’ of G.D.H. Cole and Otto Bauer and in the writings of Eduard Bernstein. It scrutinizes Polanyi's relationship with Bernstein's ‘evolutionary socialism’ and charts his ‘double movement’ vis-à-vis Marxist philosophy: in the 1910s he reacted sharply against Marxism's deterministic excesses, but he then, in the 1920s, engaged in sympathetic dialogue with Austro-Marxist thinkers. The latter, like Bernstein, disavowed economic determinism and insisted upon the importance and autonomy of ethics. Yet they simultaneously predicted a law-like expansion of democracy from the political to the economic arena. Analysis of this contradiction provides the basis for a concluding discussion that reconsiders the deterministic threads in Polanyi's oeuvre. Whereas for some Polanyi scholars these attest to his residual attraction to Marxism, I argue that matters are more complex. While Polanyi did repudiate the more rigidly deterministic of currents in Marxist philosophy, those to which he was attracted, notably Bernstein's ‘revision’ and Austro-Marxism, incorporated a deterministic fatalism of their own, in respect of democratization. Herein lies a more convincing explanation of Polanyi's incomplete escape from a deterministic philosophy of history, as exemplified in his masterwork, The great transformation

Social democracy, embeddedness and decommodification: On the conceptual innovations and intellectual affiliations of Karl Polanyi

Of the several debates that revolve around the work of the economic historian and political economist Karl Polanyi, one that continues to exercise minds concerns his analysis of, and political attitudes toward, post-war capitalism and the welfare state. Simplified a little, it is a debate with two sides. To borrow Iván Szelényi's terms, one side constructs a ‘hard’ Karl Polanyi, the other a ‘soft’ one. The former advocated a socialist mixed economy dominated by redistributive mechanisms. He was a radical socialist for whom the market should never be the dominant mechanism of economic coordination. His ‘soft’ alter ego insisted that the market system remain essentially intact but be complemented by redistributive mechanisms. The ‘double movement’ – the central thesis of his ‘Great Transformation’ – acts, in this reading, as a self-correcting mechanism that moderates the excesses of market fundamentalism; its author was positioned within the social-democratic mainstream for which the only realistic desirable goal is a regulated form of capitalism. In terms of textual evidence there is much to be said for both interpretations. In this article I suggest a different approach, one that focuses upon the meaning of Polanyi's concepts in relation to their socio-political and intellectual environment

A rule-based approach to implicit emotion detection in text

Most research in the area of emotion detection in written text focused on detecting explicit expressions of emotions in text. In this paper, we present a rule-based pipeline approach for detecting implicit emotions in written text without emotion-bearing words based on the OCC Model. We have evaluated our approach on three different datasets with five emotion categories. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms the lexicon matching method consistently across all the three datasets by a large margin of 17–30% in F-measure and gives competitive performance compared to a supervised classifier. In particular, when dealing with formal text which follows grammatical rules strictly, our approach gives an average F-measure of 82.7% on “Happy”, “Angry-Disgust” and “Sad”, even outperforming the supervised baseline by nearly 17% in F-measure. Our preliminary results show the feasibility of the approach for the task of implicit emotion detection in written text

When does the action start and finish? Making the case for an ethnographic action research in educational research

This paper explores how ethnographic and action research methodologies can be justifiably combined to create a new methodological approach in educational research. It draws on existing examples in both educational research and development studies that have discussed the use of ethnography and action research in specific projects. Interpretations of ethnography and action research are developed that aim to minimise the epistemological differences between them. The paper also contextualises an ‘ethnographic action research’ approach with reference to an example of the author’s research into participation in three ‘reception’ (first year of schooling) classes in the United Kingdom. It is argued that research into the theme of participation in early years education, using participative methods, was particularly suitable for this new methodological approach

The Regeneration Games: Commodities, Gifts and the Economics of London 2012

This paper considers contradictions between two concurrent and tacit conceptions of the Olympic ‘legacy’, setting out one conception that understands the games and their legacies as gifts alongside and as counterpoint to the prevailing discourse, which conceives Olympic assets as commodities. The paper critically examines press and governmental discussion of legacy, in order to locate these in the context of a wider perspective contrasting ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ Olympics – setting anthropological conceptions of gift-based sociality as a necessary supplement to contractual and dis-embedded socioeconomic organizational assumptions underpinning the commodity Olympics. Costbenefit planning is central to modern city building and mega-event delivery. The paper considers the insufficiency of this approach as the exclusive paradigm within which to frame and manage a dynamic socio-economic and cultural legacy arising from the 2012 games

Embodied Commons: Knowledge and Sharing in Delhi's Electronic Bazaars

The notion of the ‘sharing economy’ has recently received significant academic and non-academic attention. What the different debates have in common is an emphasis on how technologically mediated knowledge and specific social motivations enable practices of sharing. This article discusses knowledge and sharing in popular marketplaces. Based on an ethnography of Delhi’s electronic bazaars, Lajpat Rai market, Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place, this article suggests ways to think about knowledge that are embodied and practice-based: What is such embodied knowledge? How is it created and shared? The article argues that bazaars combine sociality established through face-to-face bargaining with informal trade arrangements to enable co-creation and collaboration around technological products. The resulting knowledge is tacit in nature and is mimetically transmitted between bodies. As a result, the bazaars feature a kind of sharing that is distinct from what is understood by most accounts of the sharing economy

The expressive stance: intentionality, expression, and machine art

This paper proposes a new interpretive stance for interpreting artistic works and performances that is relevant to artificial intelligence research but also has broader implications. Termed the expressive stance, this stance makes intelligible a critical distinction between present-day machine art and human art, but allows for the possibility that future machine art could find a place alongside our own. The expressive stance is elaborated as a response to Daniel Dennett's notion of the intentional stance, which is critically examined with respect to his specialized concept of rationality. The paper also shows that temporal scale implicitly serves to select between different modes of explanation in prominent theories of intentionality. It also considers the implications of the phenomenological background for systems that produce art

Jizz and the joy of pattern recognition:virtuosity, discipline and the agency of insight in UK naturalists’ arts of seeing

Approaches to visual skilling from anthropology and STS have tended to highlight the forces of discipline and control in understanding how shared visual accounts of the world are created in the face of potential differences brought about by multi-sensorial perception. Drawing upon a range of observational and interview material from an immersion in naturalist training and biological recording activities between 2003 and 2009, I focus upon jizz, a distinct form of gestalt perception much coveted by naturalist communities in the UK. Jizz is described as a tacit and embodied way of seeing that instantaneously reveals the identity of a species, relying upon but simultaneously suspending the arduous and meticulous study of an organism’s diagnostic characteristics. I explore the potential and limitations of jizz to allow for both visual precision and an enchanted and varied form of encounter with nature. In so doing, I explore how the specific characteristics of wild, intangible and irreverent virtuoso performance work closely together with disciplining taxonomic standards. As such, discipline and irreverence work together, are mutually enabling, and allow for an accommodation rather than a segregation of potential difference brought about by perceptual variety