Polanyi’s Institutionalism Between the Lines

In the social sciences, institutions are a central subject matter and key concept. This is not only the case in sociology, the science of institutions par excellence, but also in economics. Besides today’s ‘new institutional economics’, there is also ‘old institutionalism’, which flourished in the US in the first half of the 20th century. Polanyi’s institutional approach can be located between different lines of thought, and it is a challenge to trace back all possible influences. What is missing in his references, can only be assumed to be there between the lines. The aim of this chapter is to contextualise Polanyi’s institutional approach in his lifetime and highlight affinities and tensions with scholarship he was aware of but did not pay much attention to in his writings. This includes his relation to old institutionalism, which for lack of evidence has not been covered in much depth. However, in some respects it seems that Polanyi’s “variant of institutional economics” was not so far from ideas that John R. Commons voiced in his work. The chapter focuses on three phases in the development of Polanyi’s institutional approach: (a) early influences, in which Polanyi came into touch with institutional perspectives in the form of positivist legal philosophy; (b) The Great Transformation, which reconstructs the history of the market society in terms of human institutions; and (c) Polanyi’s late career, which he spent at one of the previous centres of American institutionalism in an effort to consolidate his institutional approach.