Capitalist system and its unsustainability: Karl Polanyi and Joseph A. Schumpeter

We are witnessing world-wide hegemony of the capitalism as an economic system. Despite the failures it caused, the capitalist system is reckoned as an uncontestable and indespensable system. Needless to say, one can not ignore the impacts of the transformation occured in the 1980s and neo-liberal economic policies on such evaluation. This thesis will endeavor to carry out a comparative-analysis of the ideas of two great social scientists who presented critical perspectives on the future of capitalism, i.e. Karl Polanyi and Joseph A. Schumpeter, on the unsustainability of the capitalist system by taking up The Great Transformation and Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy as main references . In this context, focus will be initially on the general ideas of Polanyi and Schumpeter on the causes that paved the way to the unsustainability of capitalism; and then, shift to another point in order to render why the ideas of these two prominent social scientists are still debated. In conclusion, even though transformations in the capitalist system that Polanyi and Schumpeter sought did not come up fully; when recent developments are regarded, this thesis argues that not only economics but also other social sciences must benefit from the perspectives provided by Polanyi and Schumpeter while problematizing the problems that were caused by the capitalist system and rethinking/questioning of it. Keywords: Karl Polanyi, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Unsustainability.