The Strong Embrace of Weak Actors: Explaining Social Support for Economic Liberalization through the Case Study of Small Business Associations in the European Union

One of the most important aspects of analyzing the political world is to understand the sources of social support for competing political projects at a given time. To understand what ideas are available to animate action is important; to understand where those ideas come from, and the material sources of support for those ideas, is vital. Ideas and political projects do not come from thin air; they come from real people in institutionally embedded contexts who act and think from a particular place, with recourse to how they perceive their own interests. A Polanyian perspective gives us a useful framework of analysis in this regard because it helps us to make sense of the inherent instability of radical projects of economic liberalism which, due to their disregard of a competing, nonmarket logic within social relations, tend to produce calls for economic regulation or a “reembedding” of the economy in nonmarket systems of valuation.