Karl Polanyi's and K. William Kapp's arguments on social costs: is there a common “revolutionary” raison d'être?

This article examines Karl Polanyi’s and K. William Kapp’s social cost proposals to test their suitability for a “revolutionary” Social Ecological Economics that radically breaks with neoclassical and neoliberal paradigms. Whilst some coherence is revealed in their revolutionary social cost analyses and solutions, this is much messier than previously thought. This messiness is partly due to their different adoptions and reactions to neoclassical and neoliberal arguments and partly due to differences in four key dimensions of social costs: simple vs. system-wide effects, local vs. central solutions, payment vs. prevention strategies, and monetary accounting vs. physical calculation. The coherence in their raison d'être is through 1) the prevention of social costs to secure social provisioning of human needs; 2) a social valuation of lexicographically ordered physical and monetary quantification of social costs; and 3) a qualitative measure as the ultimate concern, that is “social justice” of “Dasein” as a “humanitarian ideal” (Polanyi) and human “dignity” as a qualitative “measure of all things” (Kapp). This reflects their disagreement with neoclassical and neoliberal paradigms through their rejection of monetary economizing as the exclusive definition of the “economy” and for dealing with social costs.