Abstract
This theoretically focused chapter by John Holmwood adopts a strategy of conceptual ‘provincializing’ and thereby reveals race as a lacuna in Polanyian and neo-Polanyian scholarship. Alongside its wide-ranging theoretical engagement, including innovative postcolonial reflections, Holmwood’s discussion is extraordinarily timely, engaging with US ‘race relations’ and the current ‘asylum crisis’ in large parts of Europe, as well as with wider currents of marketization. Racism is thereby analysed in both its deeper historical and current socioeconomic contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
I should like to thank the Egalitarianism seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, especially Danielle Allen, Gurminder K. Bhambra, Sara Edenheim, Michael Hanchard, Charles Payne, and Mara Viveros Vigolla, for discussions that facilitated the development of the arguments in this chapter, and also Robert J. Antonio for his critical comments.
- 2.
See the page at the American Civil Liberties Union website: https://www.aclu.org/issues/voting-rights.
- 3.
It might be supposed that Parsons’s failure to publish his account of American Society (2007) in his lifetime—a project begun in the 1950s—had something to do with the intractability of racialized social problems in the light of his account of them. Tellingly, Parsons also suggested the title, “The Action of Social Structure”, yet, given his concern to establish the distinctiveness of the USA as a “multi-ethnic society” (Alexander 2007), what seems most significant was the failure of social structure to produce its effects in the very area of racialized domination. Indeed, elsewhere his account of the “system of modern society” (1971) makes only one mention of colonialism and Empire to indicate its “transitional” character (1971:137), notwithstanding it is not a transition to modernity that he discusses, and the USA is identified as the new “lead society” with no mention of it as a colonial “settler” society and the racialized character of the processes of settlement.
- 4.
See for example the speech by Prime Minister Cameron, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-33716501.
- 5.
See Banting (2005) for a more nuanced discussion.
- 6.
Lebowics’s conclusion is direct, but remains outside dominant sociological understandings: “[Locke] made the colonial empire a vital bond between Britain’s new elite and those they governed. He thereby strengthened the nascent liberalism of British society by building into it the promise of growth, of more for all, of social peace through empire” (1986: 581).
- 7.
This discussion of Posner and Weyl is based upon a short article written jointly with Gurminder K Bhambra (Holmwood and Bhambra 2015).
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Holmwood, J. (2016). Moral Economy Versus Political Economy: Provincializing Polanyi. In: Karner, C., Weicht, B. (eds) The Commonalities of Global Crises. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50273-5_6
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