Money as a fictitious commodity: making sense of the gold standard in Karl Polanyi’s <i>The Great Transformation</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent appraisals of Karl Polanyi’s account of the gold standard in The Great Transformation (The GT) have questioned the influence and contemporary relevance of his monetary thought for international political economy (IPE), charging that it obscures the critical political and governance functions of modern money. In this article, I argue that by ignoring his fundamentally social, rather than economistic, ontology of money, these critiques overlook much that is potentially useful for IPE in Polanyi’s thinking about money. Why, for instance, does Polanyi include money, commonly viewed as synonymous with commodity exchange, among the ‘fictitious’ commodities? Why is central banking at the heart of the double movement? Exploring these questions through a sympathetic rereading of The GT shows that beyond conventional interpretations that center the influence of liberal ideas or market mentalities in the drive to commodify money, Polanyi presents compelling material, political, and institutional factors motivating gold standard adoption and its interwar restoration. Instead of reflecting the conventional story of a self-equilibrating, market-based international monetary system, Polanyi highlights how the disruptions imposed on society by attempting to make money act as a commodity paradoxically propelled the emergence of modern monetary governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".