© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/156913312X631270 Comparative Sociology 11 (2012) 160–178 brill.nl/coso COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY Development heory and the Constitution of Market Society: A Polanyian View Alan Scott University of New England, NSW alan.scott@une.edu.au Abstract his paper argues that development studies could beneit from a closer engage- ment with the arguments of Karl Polanyi. Firstly, a Polanyian perspective gives greater weight to non-economic and non-material factors in making, maintaining and modifying markets. Secondly, it focuses research on the problematic, state sponsored and contested process of bringing the market actor into being. Finally, a Polanyian approach might better link a, broadly speaking, leftist analysis to “real world” policy debates about the relative balance between market freedoms and regulation. he conclusion elaborates this inal point. Keywords Karl Polanyi, market making and modifying, development, regulation, disem- bedding and reembedding However one chooses to characterize it – New Right policy, neo-liberalism or “privatized Keynesianism” (Crouch 2009) – the regime under which most of us have lived during the last thirty years has, since 2007/08, been enduring its moment of crisis. he nations state (whose demise was often predicted in early literature on economic globalization) has been back nationalizing debt and acting once more as market maker in at efort to restore the regime, perhaps in a somewhat modiied form the exact out- lines of which remain hazy. 1 It is at moments like this that some academic 1) Colin Crouch argues we are likely to see eforts to restore legitimacy and trust in the market without abandoning neo-liberalism’s anti-state bias. Such eforts are likely to produce a COSO 11.2_F3_160-178.indd 160 COSO 11.2_F3_160-178.indd 160 2/17/2012 2:28:01 PM 2/17/2012 2:28:01 PM