Cornel Ban

Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s opus on democratic transition and consolidation put Spain and Romania at the extreme ends of these processes and paid little attention to the domestic and external economic constraints on the transition process. This paper interrogates these claims. It shows that in retrospect Spain looks a lot less exemplary and Romania a lot less hopeless than this iconic contribution suggested at the time. Moreover, while external economic shocks and local attempts to buffer them through social compensation shaped both transitions, Romanian governments faced balance of payments crises and international policy conditionality constraints, while their Spanish counterparts did not. This difference invites a greater appreciation of the role of political economy analyses when comparing the policy options of political elites ruling in times of democratic transition and consolidation.

Abstract: This paper argues that scholarship on the varieties of capitalism could provide a more complete understanding of fiscal policy convergence in the Eurozone after 2010 if it better examined the interdependencies between banks and sovereigns. Recently, this scholarship has explained fiscal convergence through a global imbalances framework. While the interaction between coordinated and liberal capitalisms, and their distinctive macroeconomic policy preferences, generates global imbalances, rebalancing can only ...

Fresh food supply chains in Europe's transnational agribusinesses depend on cheap, non-unionised, and privately managed labour from low-wage eastern European countries. The costs versus benefits of this phenomenon are under-studied. By examining seasonal farm migration from Romania to Germany, we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic is, for farmworkers, a Janus-faced event. On the one hand, it has worsened the precarity of migrant farmworkers. Changes in the German state's pay legislation that excluded workers from social benefits, and the reluctance of the German state to enforce labour legislation to the full in the early stages of the pandemic sharpened what we have termed the structural disempowerment of migrant farmworkers. Romanian seasonal workers have had little choice but to implicitly subsidise the costs of German farm products. At the same time, the health crisis has made their work visible and led to processes that challenge the perception of migrant workers as passi...

How big was the economic gap between the Old Romanian Kingdom and Transylvania on the eve of the Great War and how did Transylvania and other Habsburg lands rank in the economy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? This paper makes three related claims in this regard. First, while the gap between old Romania and Transylvania appears to be rather small according to older datasets, revised long series data published more recently by Maddison and the Romanian central bank show a gap that in 2019 per capita GDP would look like the gap between Romania and Italy. If these newer data-sets built with up-to-date methodologies are correct, then the conclusion is that between December 1, 1918 and the Trianon Treaty of 1920 Romania received territories that were much better situated economically and whose growth trajectory before the Great War showed a strong convergence with Italy and Spain. While the gap between Romania and Hungary endured for most of the 20 th century , for some time during state socialism after joining the EU the gap between Romania and Hungary's GDP per capita as a share of the European average shrunk considerably , pointing at dynamics of convergence that reflect on both slower growth Hungary and stronger growth in Romania. Second, while Transylvania was at the bottom of the ranking of regions of Austro-Hungary, its gap with imperial Hungary in terms of per capita GDP was not extremely large (13 percent) and Transylvania was one of the fastest growing regions of the Empire. Third, while the gap with the Austrian average was significant, it was not dramatic and there was strong convergence with the Austrian "core" thanks to Transylvania being part of the more dynamic Hungarian economy of the turn of the century. Indeed, the paper challenges the folk REZUMAT: Cât de mare era decalajul economic dintre Vechiul Regat Român și Transilvania în ajunul Marelui Război și cum s-au clasat Transilvania și alte țări habsbur-gice în economia Imperiului Austro-Ungar? Acest articol face trei afirmații conexe în acest sens. În primul rând, în timp ce diferența dintre vechea Românie și Transilvania pare să fie destul de mică în conformitate cu seturile de date mai vechi, datele revizuite din seria lungă publicate mai recent de Maddison și Banca Națională a României arată un decalaj la nivel de PIB pe cap de locuitor care, la nivelul anului 2019, ar arăta ca diferența dintre România și Italia. Dacă aceste seturi de date mai noi construite cu metodologii actualizate sunt corecte, atunci concluzia este că între 1 decembrie 1918 și Tratatul Trianon din 1920 România a primit teritorii care erau mult mai bine situate economic și a căror traiectorie de creștere înainte de Marele Război a arătat o convergență puternică cu Italia și Spania. În timp ce decalajul dintre România și Ungaria a rezistat în cea mai mare parte a secolului al XX-lea, inclusiv în timpul socialismului de stat, după aderarea la UE, decalajul dintre PIB-ul pe cap de locuitor al României și Ungariei, ca pondere a mediei europene, s-a redus con-siderabil, indicând dinamica convergenței care reflectă creșterea mai lentă a Ungariei și creșterea mai puternică în România. În al doilea rând, în timp ce Transilvania se afla în partea de jos a clasamentului regiunilor Austro-Ungariei, decalajul său față de Ungaria imperială în ceea ce privește PIB-ul pe cap de locuitor nu era extrem de mare (13%), Transilvania fiind una dintre regiunile cu cea mai rapidă creștere a Imperiului. În al treilea rând, în timp ce decalajul cu media austriacă a fost semnificativ, nu a fost dramatic și a existat o puternică convergență cu "nucleul" austriac, datorită faptului că Transilvania făcea parte din

Polanyi pare ieşit dintr-un roman de Joseph Roth despre gloria şi decăderea Mitteleuropei. Descendent al unei familii evreieşti budapestane ale carei iluzii moderniste sunt zguduite de anti-semitism şi război, Polanyi îşi petrece începutul carierei într-o Vienă interbelică a cărei glorie progresistă îşi trăia amurgul; este însă destul de norocos să prindă vremuri când economia era un câmp intelectual plural, în care tradiţia economia liberala era departe de a fi dominantă. Marea lui confruntare cu economiştii liberali nu se produce decât după ce devine imigrant universitar în America. Acolo, în 1944, într-un mic oraş universitar din bucolicul Vermont, Polanyi termină Marea transformare. Momentul publicării acestei cărţi-pivot coincide cu începutul celor treizeci de ani glorioşi reprezentaţi de mariajul dintre macroeconomia keynesiană şi statul bunăstării. Ca omagiu adus lui Polanyi, politologul John Ruggie a numit această epocă, cu o expresie faimoasă, "liberalism încastrat social" 1. Economia nu este un domeniu separat, ci este încastrată întotdeauna în societate, iar economia capitalistă nu este o condiţie naturală a omenirii, ci a fost planificată de stat în zorii revoluţiei industriale. Acestea sunt cele două lame ale foarfecii cu care Marea Transformare foarfecă marile tradiţii ale economiei liberale: (neo)clasicii şi Şcoala Austriacă. Rezultatul este devoalarea naturii utopice a acestui proiect socio-politic radical de transformare în marfă a omului şi naturii, proiect care ni se prezintă şi azi ca un inocent mecanism de producţie a celor mai eficiente echilibre posibile, într-o lume cu resurse limitate. Pentru Polanyi, economiştii liberali sunt simpli propagandişti ai ordinii sociale capitaliste, ocupaţi să demonstreze lipsa de alternative şi caracaterul rezonabil al pieţei 1 John Gerard Ruggie, "International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order", International organization, vol. 36, nr. 2, 1982, pp. 379-415.

What professional structures (qualifications, experiences, hierarchies) shape the specific economic ideas with which central bankers and international civil servants derive legitimacy and authority under the stress of fast burning crises? The paper identifies precise and often unexpected patterns of relationships and causal mechanisms between economic ideas about fiscal policy and professional structures in the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund after the 2008 crisis. The findings rely on a novel analytical and methodological framework that provides students of public administration and expertise in international settings with a more rigorously comparative and systematic evaluation of the normative struggles and efforts to network the sympathetic interlocutors of staff in international financial institutions.

Founded in 2012, the ESM has become a crucial
actor in the EU’s economic governance: it sells bonds
on behalf of the Eurozone as a whole, and finances
EU financial assistance programmes for countries in
need. With less than 200 staff, most of its operations
outsourced to other institutions, and its highest
governing body indistinguishable from the informal
Eurogroup, this study written for Transparency International
EU shows the EU’s bailout fund has not received the
attention it deserves.

The prolonged economic downturn since the onset of
the global financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent
European sovereign debt crises continue to take a toll on
Europeans. Alongside diminished growth and depressed
rates of public and private investments, the erosion of
public trust in national and EU institutions has been one
of the most striking features of the post-crisis world.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) as the EU’s
development bank has a particularly important role to play
in this context. The 2012 capital increase is testimony
to the need to mobilise funds in times of strained public
budgets, which may be multiplied via the EIB. Similarly,
based on the analysis of persistently low public and
private investment as compared to pre-crisis levels,
Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker promised
an “investment offensive” upon taking office, with the
European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI) as the
main innovation. The investment fund was set up in
record time and uses the leveraged EU budget as a
guarantee to absorb any first losses private investors
may incur under projects selected, so as to mobilise
private investments that would otherwise have
been discouraged.
The use of the EU budget necessitates a higher
standard of accountability, especially in a politically
charged environment in which the European Union as
a whole is increasingly questioned. The development of
elements of participatory democracy can and should be
complemented with a demonstrative push for proactive
transparency and openness on the part of EU institutions,
including the EIB. This push that may well serve the
interest of the institutions in ensuring that citizens
appreciate their value added more than has previously
been the case.

In this context, the present study aims to assess the
transparency, integrity and accountability mechanisms
in place at the EIB.

The debate about socioeconomic inequalities and class has become increasingly important in mainstream academic and political debates. This article shows that during the late 2000s class analysis was rediscovered in Romania both as an analytical category and as a category of practice. The evidence suggests that this was the result of two converging processes: the deepening crisis of Western capitalism after 2008 and the country's increasingly transnational networks of young scholars, journalists, and civil society actors. Although a steady and focused interest in class analysis is a novelty in Romania's academia, media, and political life and has the potential to change the political conversation in the future, so far the social fields where this analysis is practiced have remained relatively marginal.

Economic historians regard Ordoliberalism as a school of thought whose reach was limited to Germany. Challenging this popular view, this study shows that Ordoliberalism also had considerable impact on Spanish economics during the 1940s and 1950s, despite the fact that Spain's policy establishment favored a state-led and predominantly anti-liberal development model. This puzzling outcome was the result of the exceptional ideational entrepreneurship of Ordoliberal economist Heinrich von Stackelberg, who was a visiting professor in Madrid from 1943 until his death in 1946. His intellectual entrepreneurship in the Spanish economic profession proved to have lasting consequences, as the policy-oriented intellectuals he influenced came to occupy leading positions in academia and economic policy institutions. This paper also contributes to the empirical literature on the diffusion of economic ideas across national epistemic boundaries by highlighting the role of exceptional economists acting as carriers of new economic ideas. Finally, the study helps illuminate a critical juncture in the intellectual history of Spanish economics during the Francoist regime.

Since 2008, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become more open to the use of discretionary fiscal stimulus packages to deal with recessions, while changing its doctrine on the timing and content of fiscal consolida- tion. The article traces this evolution of the Fund’s doctrine to staff politics, more diverse thinking in mainstream economics, and a careful framing of the message through the use of mainstream macroeconomic models. To map the changing contours of institutional views on fiscal policy through 2008– 2013, the article undertakes a detailed content analysis of official publica- tions from the Fiscal Affairs Department and the Research Department. The connection between these shifts and significant personnel shake-ups is demonstrated through an extensive biographical analysis of the authors of all IMF studies cited in the official reports of the two departments. The findings contribute to the emerging debate on the sources of intellectual and policy change in international economic organizations.

After a decade of dominance of neoliberal ideas about state-society relations, the contentious politics triggered by the Great Recession have brought to the fore a robustly critical engagement with the ideological status quo that is clearly Left-oriented. This study addresses this intellectual transformation from the standpoint of the incremental return of class as an analytical category in academic and public discourse. Constituted by a young generation of new media journalists, social scientists and philosophers, this opposition has grown to have an important presence in academia, civil society, old and new media. Active and increasingly visible, the constituency for a sustained critique of class relations in Romania may be too small and ideologically diverse to morph into a social movement, a political party or a unionization drive in the immediate future. Nevertheless, it offers future intellectuals and political entrepreneurs the opportunity to critically engage with enduring questions about class politics and the boundaries of democracy. Their Berlin Wall moment was not 1989 but 2008, and this may yet change Romanian politics as we know it.

Historically, high sovereign debt and austerity policies have coincided with regime- changing popular uprisings. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania was no exception. Why, when faced with a sovereign debt crisis in the 1980s, did his regime choose to pay its foreign debt as early as possible, at the cost of economic recession and dramatically compressed consumption? How did these choices relate to the regime’s failure to sur- vive the end of the decade? The article argues that while exogenous shocks shattered the economic bases of the regime, it was the ideas with which the regime understood development and interpreted the crisis that shaped government policy responses in the 1980s. When the price of oil and development finance went up abruptly in 1979, the low energy efficiency of Romanian industry pushed the country into a situation where debt levels became unsustainable. Committed to a view of development that blended nationalist and Stalinist ideas, but with a focus on policy sovereignty, Ceausescu diag- nosed the crisis as evidence that debt-financed development and policy independence were incompatible. Consequently the regime decided to pay off foreign debt through a mix of austerity, import substitution, and export-led accumulation of dollar reserves. By the time all debt was paid off in 1989, the regime’s economic sources of legitimacy were exhausted. In the external environment of 1989, this policy regime change con- tributed to political regime change even in the absence of an organized civil society. In addition to casting a new light on the causal mechanisms of the Romanian revolution of December 1989, the findings of this article contribute to emerging scholarship that stresses the nexus between debt-induced economic crisis and popular uprisings.

ARTICLE COMMENTARY| MAY 20 2021
Central Banking in Pandemic Times
Collections: Special Collection: Global Political Economy of COVID-19 , Section: Political Economy, Markets, and Institutions
Cornel Ban
1.cba.ioa@cbs.dk
Global Perspectives (2021) 2 (1): 24188.
https://doi.org/10.1525/gp.2021.24188
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The sense of extreme disruption brought by Covid-19 led to the fast adoption of unprecedented containment policies. Central banks played a key role in this regard by adopting bold and unprecedented forms of financial stabilization as well as support for government debt in the bond markets. The overall effect has been the blurring of the boundary between monetary and fiscal policy, a key pillar of the “neoliberal” era. Furthermore, the Fed acted as a de facto lender of last resort in dollars of the global financial system, thus playing a global stabilization role even as the Trump administration worked to weaken traditional US ties to global economic governance.

While both Romania and Bulgaria were ravaged by the terminal crisis of the early postcommunist economy, for material and intellectual reasons Bulgaria adopted a currency board regime with broad macroeconomic implications that locked society and politics into a very orthodox policy regime that constrained the domestic consumption channel and primed Bulgaria for the fulfillment of nominal convergence criteria. In contrast, Romania did not, and this allowed its policy elites to have more policy space for the decades to come. The resulting path-dependency in the policy sphere clicked well with the (related) growth regime, and Bulgaria morphed into a small open economy relying on external demand (via exports) as its main engine of growth. In contrast, Romania had a more balanced growth regime, with one leg on the exports and the other on consumption. Bulgaria’s policy and growth regimes delivered the stability that a society traumatized by hyperinflation needed (albeit at the expense of poor real convergence), leading its policy actors to develop an impregnable consensus on turning the currency board into the basis for the euro membership reforms that guarantee nominal convergence. In contrast Romania’s delivered both better export performance and higher consumption growth, locking in apolitical dynamics that disincentivized political investment in the growth, employment and consumption moderation required by nominal convergence. All this eventually resulted in a trailblazer dynamic (Bulgaria) and a laggard one (Romania) that had only minor partisanship inflections.

The conventional wisdom is that since 2010, austerity has been the dominant policy coming from established EU institutions. This paper shows that that the expansion of the role of the EIB and the entry of the ESM and EFSI in the governance mechanisms of the crisis has put some wrinkles on this common perception. Most importantly, these new institutional arrivals in the EU crisis management regime have contributed to a productively incoherent arrangement where the calibration of interventions to provide more accommodation for the member states’ and the balancing between austerity and stimulus became central to the regime.

In political economy terms, the year 1989 for East-Central Europe meant the shift from predominantly closed economies to integration into transnational financial, manufacturing and service chains that make up the spaghetti bowl of globalization. The anniversary of 1989 calls for some systematic cross regional comparison in terms of the promises made and the results delivered as part of that world historical transformation. Most importantly, however, it calls for a closer look at the distributional drivers of the region’s growth regimes.

Have European policy makers reacted to the 2008 crisis with single-minded determination to constitutionalize austerity or have they instead been reflexive and used the crisis to generate EU-level buffer mechanisms against financial and macroeconomic crises? This paper argues that this emphasis on austerity from the existing literature on the European governance of the crisis can benefit from two consequential nuances. First, the EU established a full-fledged lender of last resort function for sovereigns and banks (European Stability Mechanism) that might soon morph into a consummate lender of last resort. Second, the EU also acquired a Keynesian face in the form of a countercyclical and competitiveness-boosting lending fund (European Fund for Strategic Investments) that strengthens the EU's investment state regime linking the EU with national development banks. However, the paper finds that the first function comes at the cost of imposing pressures for pro-cyclical fiscal policies on countries facing sovereign debt issues that are in excess of those demanded by the IMF. Similarly, the countercyclical lending fund has had a patchy record at delivering investment support to the countries that needed it the most.

The local " editing " of the IMF's doctrines and policies in countries with weak expertise can be explained by the role of popular protest, interest group and electoral strategy. It is commonplace to argue that these forms of politics can prevent some neoliberal ideas from being implemented as policies. Yet, the specific form that the Fund's views takes among dominant policy elites in a certain country over time can only be explained if we look at the economic ideas embraced by the policymakers by virtue of their training or other forms of professional socialization before such potent forms of politics kicked in.

The local " editing " of the IMF's doctrines and policies in countries with weak expertise can be explained by the role of popular protest, interest group and electoral strategy. It is commonplace to argue that these forms of politics can prevent some neoliberal ideas from being implemented as policies. Yet, the specific form that the Fund's views takes among dominant policy elites in a certain country over time can only be explained if we look at the economic ideas embraced by the policymakers by virtue of their training or other forms of professional socialization before such potent forms of politics kicked in.

This paper proposes a usable definition of neoliberalism that avoids its excessively narrow and broad definitions and, hopefully, the intellectual confusion that surrounds this popular term. As such, it focuses on economic theories and schools of thought as the core of neoliberal coordinative discourse, with Spain, the IMF, Romania and Brazil providing the main illustrations. By calling on political economists to engage more systematically with economic theory and history, the paper defines neoliberalism as a set historically contingent and intellectually hybrid economic ideas and policy regimes derived from specific economic theories whose distinctive and shared goals are financial market credibility, trade and financial openness and the safeguarding of internal and external competitiveness.

This study attempts to advance the state of theory in the political science scholarship on the transnational diffusion of economic ideas. Its main claim is that the current understanding of diffusion as a staggered process linking innovation and domestic adoption is problematic and should be either qualified or replaced with the more reflexive and dynamic concept of ‘translation’ used in actor-network theory.

This paper argues that the financialization of sovereign bond markets as a critical factor in the European austerity drive. The paper shows how the politically engineered pre-crisis shift to transnational market-based, collateral intensive models of European banks’ locked banks and sovereigns together in an embrace that led governments towards austerity rather than any other instrument of rebalancing. The main value added of the paper is to show how systemic-level changes in Europe’s state-finance relations opened up new spaces of policy coercion exercised by the central bank of the monetary union.

This was a political choice anchored in a specific transnational epistemic elite whose membership cut across critical sites of European governance: European banks, their accountants and their lawyers, the ECB, the Commission and academia.  The international regime they created provided more collateral at the cost of eroding banks’ loyalty to their government’s bonds, as the diverse investor base and the availability of alternative sources of collateral reduced the costs of exit for banks faced with sovereign risk. In sum, the Euro plus the repo turned ostensibly European lending into international lending in a common currency with disastrous results when the sudden stop occurred.

When the run on repo began in the Eurozone, these systemic transformations in state-finance relations percolated deeply in how fiscally balanced countries like Spain conducted fiscal policy. At first, the crisis ushered in a recalibration of neoliberal fiscal theories with bold Keynesian ideas that pushed the limits of mainstream fiscal policy. This approach was owed to the prominent positions in the state held by Spanish economists who had been at the forefront of major intellec¬tual shift in global macroeconomics. Given that the Spanish policy process was highly centralized and the prime minister’s transnationalized economic advisers socialized him into this synthesis of neoliberal and Keynesian ideas, between 2008 and 2010 Spain met the crisis with the largest expenditure- based stimulus in Europe.

However, when the sovereign bond market crisis that struck the “periphery” of the Eurozone in the spring of 2010 brought the Spanish financial system and the fiscal position of the Spanish government to the edge of the precipice, EU-level coercive mechanisms kicked into gear alongside market-based ones, terminating this Spanish experi¬ment. As the solutions provided by the European governance of the crisis failed to stabilize the bond markets in the “periphery” and with the ECB acting as the enforcer of fiscal orthodoxy, Spain came under extreme pressure to dismantle its attempt to shield society against the dislocations produced by the dramatic shrinking of cross-border finance.

This paper argues that the financialization of sovereign bond markets acted as a critical factor in the European austerity drive. By focusing on Spain, it  shows how the politically engineered pre-crisis shift to transnational market-based, collateral intensive models of European banks’ locked banks and sovereigns together in an embrace that led governments towards
austerity rather than any other instrument of rebalancing. The main value added of the paper is to show how systemic-level changes in Europe’s state-finance relations opened up new spaces of policy coercion exercised by the central bank of the monetary union. When the run on repo began in the Eurozone, these systemic transformations in state-finance relations percolated deeply in how fiscally balanced countries like Spain
conducted fiscal policy. At first, the crisis ushered in a recalibration of neoliberal fiscal theories with bold Keynesian ideas that pushed the limits of mainstream fiscal policy. This approach was owed to the prominent positions in the state held by Spanish economists who
had been at the forefront of major intellectual shift in global macroeconomics. Given that the Spanish policy process was highly centralized and the prime minister’s transnationalized economic advisers socialized him into this synthesis of neoliberal and Keynesian ideas, between 2008 and 2010 Spain met the crisis with the largest expenditurebased stimulus in Europe. However, when the sovereign bond market crisis that struck the “periphery” of the Eurozone in
the spring of 2010 brought the Spanish financial system and the fiscal position of the Spanish government to the edge of the precipice, EU-level coercive mechanisms kicked into gear alongside market-based ones, terminating this Spanish experiment. As the solutions provided by
the European governance of the crisis failed to stabilize the bond markets in the “periphery” and with the ECB acting as the enforcer of fiscal orthodoxy, Spain came under extreme pressure to dismantle its attempt to shield society against the dislocations produced by the dramatic shrinking
of cross-border finance.

Financialization accounts for critical sources of variation in terms of consumption, wages and capital investment lens dynamics that are at the heart of for the established growth regimes approach. The main argument is that each of the growth regimes theorized by Bacarro and Pontusson have distinct financialization dynamics and these shaped the observed diversity in terms of the contribution of exports and consumption to GDP growth in each of the growth regimes. Indeed, all of them have been transformed by financialization and particularly by shareholder value orientation and increasing reliance of non-financial firms on financial activities, leading to growing corporate profits even as capital investment declined in all cases. From this perspective financialization was indeed a fix to the decline in profits. However, the extent and mode of financialization explains why Sweden has higher capital investment than all the other cases while still projecting robust consumption growth, why consumption has been so resilient as a growth engine in Britain but not in Italy and why the German growth regime was constrained to stay competitive in export markets by repressing consumption.

Fiscal populism is a thin-centered ideology that pits the fiscally pure people against elites judged to be problematic for some particular set of reasons, with a fiscal general will whose boundaries are defined by the populist adjudicating the outcome. The purpose of this ideology (and the policies derived from it) is to fiscally favor domestic capital over factions of foreign capital unessential to the domestic growth model, with domestic labor interests in a subordinated role. By looking at the case of Romania in the 2010s, the chapter proposes the concept of national-neoliberal fiscal populism to analyze a political economic context in which Romania wasted the opportunity to bolster its fiscal resources in one of Europe's longest and largest economic boom periods. The empirics suggests that this is a sufficiently apt term to conceptualize a particular translation of populism to policies ensuring the revenues of the state.

Karl Polanyi pare ieşit dintr-un roman de Joseph Roth despre gloria şi decăderea Mitteleuropei. Descendent al unei familii evreieşti budapestane ale carei iluzii moderniste sunt zguduite de anti-semitism şi război, Polanyi îşi petrece începutul carierei într-o Vienă interbelică a cărei glorie progresistă îşi trăia amurgul; este însă destul de norocos să prindă vremuri când economia era un câmp intelectual plural, în care tradiţia economia liberala era departe de a fi dominantă. Marea lui confruntare cu economiştii liberali nu se produce decât după ce devine imigrant universitar în America. Acolo, în 1944, într-un mic oraş universitar din bucolicul Vermont, Polanyi termină Marea transformare. Momentul publicării acestei cărţi-pivot coincide cu începutul celor treizeci de ani glorioşi reprezentaţi de mariajul dintre macroeconomia keynesiană şi statul bunăstării. Ca omagiu adus lui Polanyi, politologul John Ruggie a numit această epocă, cu o expresie faimoasă, "liberalism încastrat social" 1. Economia nu este un domeniu separat, ci este încastrată întotdeauna în societate, iar economia capitalistă nu este o condiţie naturală a omenirii, ci a fost planificată de stat în zorii revoluţiei industriale. Acestea sunt cele două lame ale foarfecii cu care Marea Transformare foarfecă marile tradiţii ale economiei liberale: (neo)clasicii şi Şcoala Austriacă. Rezultatul este devoalarea naturii utopice a acestui proiect socio-politic radical de transformare în marfă a omului şi naturii, proiect care ni se prezintă şi azi ca un inocent mecanism de producţie a celor mai eficiente echilibre posibile, într-o lume cu resurse limitate. Pentru Polanyi, economiştii liberali sunt simpli propagandişti ai ordinii sociale capitaliste, ocupaţi să demonstreze lipsa de alternative şi caracaterul rezonabil al pieţei