The Polanyian Perspective in the Era of Neoliberalism: The Protection of Global Intellectual Property Rights Chakkri Chaipinit Christopher May Introduction In light of the continuing interest in his work, this article aims to further illustrate the contemporary utility of Karl Polanyi's theoretical perspective. As is well known, his most famous book, The Great Transformation, sets out the so-called 'double movement' to explain the rise and decline of the liberal 'self-regulating market'. According to Polanyi, this market served to transform natural resources and social life into the 'fictitious commodities' of land, money and labour, which destroyed the previous social embeddedness of traditional communities. This confrontation prompted collective resistance in the form of 'self protectionism' to impair the market, leading Polanyi to argue that the liberal market society was a stark-utopia that could never be finally consolidated (Polanyi, 1957a: 3). We argue, as have others, that these insights can be applied to analyze the market economy under neo-liberalism which emerged in the late 1970s. This new 'self- regulating market' included a new set of fictitious commodities by which knowledge and information have been vigorously commodified: patents, copyrights, and trademarks or (collectively) intellectual property rights (IPRs), making knowledge and information costly to access (Jessop, 2003: 18-22). Again market developments have led to a counter movement (Munck, 2007: 34-9), which suggests that the Polanyian perspective remains a useful political economy analysis. However, rather than limiting this analysis to the double movement here we utilise additional elements of Polanyi's approach including his concepts institutional