Margaret R. Somers

From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate.

To understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony, we compare the U.S. 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act and the English 1834 New Poor Law—two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones. Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by “the perversity thesis”—a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poors condition from “poverty to perversity.” We use the term “ideational embeddedness” to characterize the power of such ideas to shape, structure, and change market regimes. The success of the perversity thesis is based on the foundations of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and the conversion narrative. In the poverty to perversity conversion narrative, structural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfares perverse incentives on poor people themselves—they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop longterm dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology. Coupling economic sociology with a sociology of ideas, we argue that ideas count; but not all ideas are created equal. Only some have the capacity to fuel radical transformations in the ideational embeddedness of markets.

In the Shadow of Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law:

In 1996, the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act that ended the entitlement of poor families to government assistance. The debate leading up to that transformation in welfare policy occurred in the shadow of Speenhamland—an episode in English Poor Law history. This article revisits the Speenhamland episode to unravel its tangled history. Drawing on four decades of recent scholarship, the authors show that Speenhamland policies could not have had the consequences that have been attributed to them. The article ends with an alternative narrative that seeks to explain how the Speenhamland story became so deeply entrenched.

Karl Polanyi in an Age of Uncertainty

Although Karl Polanyi’s masterwork, The Great Transformation, was originally published in 1944, it was not until the sharp turn toward the neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early1980s that his work and his ideas began to be widely discovered by sociologists and social scientists more generally. Unlike the upsurge of Marxism in the1960s, it was not attention to exploitation that provoked the turn toward Polanyi. Rather, it was the rise of a new worship of the market as the only legitimate organizing mechanism of society, an ideological zeal all the more perplexing for having been widely perceived—including by Polanyi himself—to have been defeated with the economic crises of the 1930s and the success of New Deal liberalism. As efforts to ‘‘liberate’’ the market from ‘‘failed’’ Keynesian policies continued to spread virally, it is not surprising that Polanyi’s The Great Transformation became so compelling to so many. Alone among the major theorists of modern capitalism, Polanyi put the market itself—not the mode of production or even capitalism per se—at the center of his analysis. Even more uniquely, in The Great Transformation (subsequently GT) the market is at once the thing to be explained (the explanandum) as well as the explanatory force (explanans) behind the political and economic conditions that gave rise in the nineteenth century to the first market society and its subsequent demise in the twentieth. Two recent events have provoked yet another spike of interest in Polanyi’s work. The first was Bernie Sanders’s unexpected success as the first self-declared ‘‘democratic socialist’’ to come close to winning the presidential nomination of a major party. In ‘‘Karl Polanyi for President,’’ an online article in Dissent, Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal argue that Sanders and his supporters were not Marxists but Polanyians, even if they were unfamiliar with the Hungarian social theorist. Their suggestion was remarkably perceptive. For while Polanyi called himself a ‘‘lifelong socialist’’ and a champion of the working class, his socialism was attuned to the moral and social predations inflicted on humanity and the natural world by the relentless Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left, by Gareth Dale. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 381 pp.

Citizenship and the place of the public sphere: law, community, and political culture in the transition to democracy

40.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780231176088.