Zement und Gesellschaft: Modernisierungsskizzen aus dem Geist Karl Polanyis

Abstract: This short paper attempts, under the headings of a metaphor made famous by Thomas Hobbes, David Hume or, in recent times, Jon Elster, to integrate and to combine three groups of results: First, it tries to reconstruct, with the help of contemporary theories of self-organization and evolutionary economics, the grand vision of societal development originally put forward by Karl Polanyi. Second, it establishes a model-sketch for the explanation of the long-term migrations between market sectors and the segments of the protective belt as well as within these two domains. Third, it gives a brief exposition of a new class of models especially suited for social domains, namely of metabolism-repair models (M-R-models) which are capable, at least in principle, to capture essential insights of the processes of the Great Transformation. It is hoped for that the combination of these three results turns out to be interesting enough to surpass the critical threshold of attention formationon the side of prospective readers.;