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Polanyi Twisted

Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist

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The Interplay Between Political Theory and Movies

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Abstract

Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation has had a substantial impact in a variety of disciplines. It contains a wealth of ideas which have helped scholars illuminate various contemporary political, social and economic issues. This chapter presents an approach to Polanyi’s work through the use of the movie Oliver Twist. It is argued that the movie provides an innovative way to think through some of the key themes in Polanyi’s book, in particular the famous metaphors of ‘embeddedness’ and ‘disembeddedness’ and also the relation that Polanyi posited between the economic ‘improvement’ experienced in industrialising Victorian England and the ‘habitation’ of the poor upon which such improvement depended. The chapter begins by presenting an intellectual case for foregrounding the historical and emotional aspects of The Great Transformation, moving on to interpret various scenes from the movie from a Polanyian perspective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To be clear this is a reductionist rendering of the idea, which has been subject to various criticisms (see Holmes 2012).

  2. 2.

    For a good literature overview and the debate on the value of movies for pedagogy, see Swimelar (2012).

  3. 3.

    In film analytic terms, the movie and referents reality are overlapping (Korte 2010, 23–24).

  4. 4.

    Of course it is questionable how desirable the kind of security of social meaning offered by cottage labour and traditional agriculture actually was, but in as far as this normative one-sidedness is a weakness, it is one that the film and the book both share, and so it is a worthy point for reflection.

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Acknowledgements

I have to thank Chris Holmes for all the ideas and commands that brought this chapter to a new level.

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  1. Institute for Political Science, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany

    Ulrich Hamenstädt

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  1. Ulrich Hamenstädt
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Correspondence to Ulrich Hamenstädt .

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  1. Institute for Political Science, University of Münster, Muenster, Germany

    Ulrich Hamenstädt

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Hamenstädt, U. (2019). Polanyi Twisted. In: Hamenstädt, U. (eds) The Interplay Between Political Theory and Movies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90731-4_11

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