Polanyi in space

The purpose of this chapter is to uncover something that for too long has been hidden practically in plain sight. It offers an exploratory appreciation of Polanyi’s potential as a spatial theorist, albeit a somewhat closeted one – that is, as a pioneering and creative analyst of geographically variegated economies. The pluralisation of this latter word is anything but casual, since Polanyi’s name has long been associated with the position that (all) economies are socially embedded and heterogeneously constituted, and that they are variably instituted or regulated, as well as with principled repudiations of (market) universalism, (stagist) teleology and (explanatory) monism (see Polanyi, 1957a, 1977; see also Gudeman, 2001; Burawoy, 2003; Hann and Hart, 2011). His is a body of work, furthermore, that by force of circumstances was produced under lifelong conditions of dislocation and displacement. It bears the hallmarks of a scholarly and indeed personal life lived in a somewhat stressed and liminal manner, the consequences of which included an elevated sensitivity to (historical and geographical) context and a somewhat paradoxical appreciation for the role of ‘embeddedness’ (see Dale, 2016a). Quite distinctively but hardly coincidentally, it is also a body of work founded on the recognition that pathways of socioeconomic development – past, present and future; real and imagined – are neither unidirectional nor singular. Having avoided the ‘fallacious assumption that all societies [have] operated on the same economic principles’ (Block and Somers, 2014: 65), Polanyi can be considered to be one of the original theorists of the hybrid, heterogeneous and pluralised economy, one that by definition is subject to uneven spatial development and contestable modes of regulation, to disequilibrating forces and endemic restructuring.