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The Great Transformation, written for a broad audience, is witty and passionate as well as erudite. The prose is lyrical, despite
the fact that English was Polanyi’s third language after Hungarian and German.
Contrary to libertarian economists from Adam Smith to Hayek, Polanyi argued, there was nothing “natural” about the free
market. Primitive economies were built on social obligations. Modern commercial society depended on “deliberate State action”
by and for elites. “Laissez-faire” he writes, savoring the oxymoron, “was planned.”
Libertarian economists, who treat the market as universal—disengaged from local cultures and historic time—are fanatics whose
ideas end in tragedy. Their prescription means “no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of
economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”
Like Marx, Polanyi begins in England, the first fully capitalist nation. In Polanyi’s telling, the slow shift from a post-feudal to a
capitalist economic system accelerated in the 18th century, when the enclosure movement (“a revolution of the rich against the
poor”) deprived the rural people of historic rights to supplement incomes by grazing domestic animals on common land, and the
industrial revolution began to undermine craft occupations.
For a time, social cushions left over from feudalism sheltered ordinary people from the turbulence of markets. “England
withstood without grave damage the calamity of the enclosures,” Polanyi wrote, because protections guaranteed by the Crown
could “slow down the process of economic improvement until it became socially bearable.” Conservatives understood this better
than economic liberals. Polanyi invokes the views of George Canning,* a Tory who served as foreign secretary and later prime
minister, that the poor laws—traditional relief payments that protected the rural working class from periodic destitution—“saved
England from a revolution.” But in the early 19th century, the rising merchant class, the emergent Liberal Party, and the ideology
of laissez-faire together produced a social order based on a self--regulating market.
The old poor laws were abolished in 1834 in favor of the poorhouse, an institution designed to be so degrading that workers
would accept the dismal labor-market wages in William Blake’s dark, satanic mills. Meanwhile, free trade became the norm,
meaning lower grain prices in the short run (and depressed wages) but increased volatility in the price of food. In the same
period, the rise of a rigidly enforced gold standard limited the state’s ability to temper periodic downturns.
An economy oblivious to social consequences had to engender backlash. The sponsors of protective measures were often
conservatives concerned about social stability, such as the English Tory Benjamin Disraeli and the Prussian Iron Chancellor Otto
von Bismarck. “The [English] Ten Hours Bill of 1847,” Polanyi writes, “which Karl Marx hailed as the first victory of socialism,
was the work of enlightened reactionaries.” But by the late 19th century, periodic financial panics and depressions menaced both
society and the market system. This got displaced into nationalism, culminating in World War I.
After that war, the victorious nations tried to restore the trinity of free trade, the gold standard, and unprotected labor markets.
Obsessed with sound currency, market ideologues and bankers demanded austerity policies leading to both mass unemployment
and episodes of hyperinflation. Given the legacy of war debts and dislocations, all this was more than the economy or society
could bear. Market institutions, Polanyi writes, “broke down in the twenties everywhere—in Germany, Italy, or Austria, the event
was merely more political and more dramatic.”
In a few places, politics produced a third way—neither the hegemony of the turbulent market nor the grim security of the total
state. Social-democratic Sweden and New Deal America devised a mixed economy that civilized the brute energy of capitalism.
At the time Polanyi was writing, others converged on the same aspiration. In Britain, Lord Beveridge was composing his
blueprint for a postwar welfare state. Part II, published in 1944, carried the Polanyian title Full Employment in a Free Society. At
Bretton Woods, also in 1944, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White were inventing a postwar international financial
system that made room for domestic social democracy freed from the pressures of gold and deflation. A few months after
Polanyi’s book went to press urging that “rights of the citizen hitherto unacknowledged must be added to the Bill of Rights”
including “the right of the individual to a job,” Franklin Roosevelt delivered his “Second Bill of Rights” speech in January 1944,
calling for exactly that. Polanyi was not formally a player in the planning for Bretton Woods; he does not cite Beveridge, nor
could he have known about FDR’s coming speech. But in the aftermath of depression, dictatorship, and war, the shared vision of
managed capitalism was in the air. Nobody gave it context and gravitas better than Polanyi.
For three decades, the success of a social settlement between labor and capital seemed to vindicate both Polanyi’s critique and his
hopes. But the compromise did not stick. The path of capitalism since the 1970s has repeated the 19th-century hegemony of the
market and is beginning to resemble the darker history of the 1920s and 1930s.
How did Karl Polanyi become the great non-Marxian synthesizer of the tragic interplay of markets, society, and politics? He was
born in Vienna in 1886 during a short era known as the “Great Generation,” when the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire was a
center of intellectual and political enlightenment. His Hungarian father, Mihaly Pollacsek, with a Swiss engineering degree, was
a designer of Vienna’s rail system. The family’s surname, of Polish-Jewish origin, was magyarized to Polanyi after Mihaly’s
death in 1905,** and the family ceased identifying as Jews. Polanyi grew up mostly in Budapest, where his Russian-born mother,
Cecile, ran a literary and political salon, and he attended the elite Trefort Street Gymnasium. The illustrious family included his
younger brother Michael, a chemist who became a libertarian political philosopher, and Michael’s son, John, who won the Nobel
in Chemistry, as well as the artist Eva Zeisel.
Expelled from the University of Budapest in 1907 after a brawl in which anti-Semitic right-wingers harassed a popular socialist
professor and Polanyi and his friends rushed to his defense, he repaired to the provincial University of Kolozsvar (today Cluj in
Romania) to finish a doctor of law degree. While still a student, Polanyi helped found the left-wing Galilei Circle, serving as its
first president and editor of its magazine. After a flirtation with Marx, Polanyi was drawn to the more temperate Socialism of
Robert Owen, Richard Tawney, and G.D.H. Cole and the British Fabians. In today’s language, he was a social democrat.
Polanyi served in the world war as a cavalry officer. He contracted typhus and came home to find Budapest torn between
nationalist right and far left. At the time of the aborted Hungarian Soviet revolution of 1919 (which he opposed), Polanyi left
Budapest for Vienna. His war experience, illness, and the destruction of liberal Budapest left him frail and emotionally
exhausted. But in 1920, he met the love of his life, a petite firebrand named Ilona Duczynska. Her biographer called their union
“a marriage between an anarchist world revolutionary and a reclusive liberal scholar.” Ilona was expelled from the Communist
Party that year for her independent views. The couple had their only child, Kari, in 1923. Soon, Polanyi was contributing to local
journals and running an informal economics seminar from the family apartment on the Vorgartenstrasse.
To provide a counterweight to neoliberal dystopia, Polanyi believed the working class needed to be mobilized politically, in a
robust democracy. He arrived at this conclusion not merely from theory but from his worker-education efforts at the Galilei
Circle and by living in one of the most successful social-democratic epochs of the European experience, Red Vienna in the 1920s
and early 1930s—red as in social-democratic, not communist. There, after World War I, socialist municipal governments in
power for 15 years built model low-rent housing financed by taxation. Parents received kindergartens, day care, and a family
allowance in the form of a “clothes package.” Gas, water, and electricity were provided by publicly owned utilities. Taxes on the
wealthy included surcharges on the use of servants. Generous unemployment insurance strengthened workers’ bargaining power.
Polanyi viewed Red Vienna as a hopeful counterpoint to the Dickensian poorhouse on one extreme and fascism on the other. The
perverse reforms of early-19th-century England were products of the weakness of the working class, he wrote, but Red Vienna
was a badge of its strength: “While [English poor-law reform] caused a veritable disaster of the common people, Vienna achieved
one of the most spectacular cultural triumphs of Western history.” But as Polanyi appreciated, an island of municipal socialism
could not survive larger market dislocations and rising fascism. Four months after he departed Vienna in 1933, the right took
over.
The nature of the times caused Polanyi and his wife Ilona to be twice separated, first when he moved to England and she stayed
behind as part of the anti-fascist underground until 1936 and again for more than a year, when Polanyi backed into a wartime stay
in America. He had been on a lecture tour of U.S. colleges, his third such visit. Peter Drucker, a friend from Vienna and later an
influential theorist of corporate management, invited Polanyi to spend the summer of 1940 in southern Vermont with him and his
wife. With the support of Drucker and another émigré scholar and friend, economist Jacob Marschak, then teaching at the New
School, Polanyi applied for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to stay at Bennington to complete his book. Among his
references were prominent London acquaintances, including a young war correspondent named Edward R. Murrow.
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In the 1944 catalog of publisher Farrar & Rinehart, the entry for The Great Transformation appropriately compares it to Keynes’s
succinct 1919 classic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. But while Keynes’s book was a best-seller, turning its author
into a celebrity, The Great Transformation sold just 1,701 copies in 1944 and 1945.
The New York Times reviewer, John Chamberlain, was savage: “This beautifully written essay in the revaluation of a hundred and
fifty years of history adds up to a subtle appeal for a new feudalism, a new slavery, a new status of economy that will tie men to
their places of abode and their jobs.” If that sounds just like Polanyi’s nemesis, Hayek, it was for good reason. Chamberlain had
just written the foreword to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, also published in 1944. While Hayek’s book was adapted in Reader’s
Digest and became a best-seller, Polanyi’s languished.
By 1946, however, Polanyi had been reviewed, mostly favorably, in major newspapers and social-science journals, and he was
slowly attracting a following. At 61, Polanyi was offered his first real academic job in 1947 at Columbia, where he taught until
1953. But in the Cold War chill, the State Department refused to give a permanent visa to Ilona, and she relocated to Canada.
After attempting to commute from Toronto, Polanyi spent his final years settled there, returning to an early scholarly interest in
economic anthropology.
Temperamentally, he was both a work obsessive and a romantic. His habit of phoning former students at odd hours to discuss
arcane ideas was part of his charm. Polanyi’s letters to his wife and daughter are filled with tenderness. One of his great essays is
on Hamlet, and his last work, published in 1963, was a jointly edited book with Ilona, The Plough and the Pen, with an
introduction by W.H. Auden, on the struggles of modern Hungary as rendered by Hungarian poets and essayists.
Fred Block and Margaret Somers, both economic sociologists, have been Polanyi admirers for more than three decades. In The
Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique, they aim to reintroduce him in an era of resurgent laissez-faire and
political blockage that he could have scripted. “Our focus,” they write, “is on the rebirth in the 1970s and 1980s of the same free
market ideas that were widely assumed to have died in the Great Depression.”
Block and Somers provide a thorough reprise of Polanyi for readers new to him and careful analysis for specialists. The best part
of their book is its introductory chapter, a well—integrated and brisk summary of the man and his ideas. Other chapters provide
useful discussions of what Polanyi’s social history gets right and slightly wrong, as well as astute comparisons of Polanyi with
Keynes and Marx.
Unlike Marx, Polanyi viewed the transformation of a more balanced commercial society into a market-dominated one as neither
natural nor inevitable. For Polanyi, as Block and Somers observe, “progress could only come through conscious human action
based on moral principles.” Though there was a logical pattern to capitalism’s overwhelming social structures, we were not
doomed to repeat our mistakes. Polanyi was a huge fan of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which he saw as the sane alternative to laissez-
faire dystopia on the one side and totalitarian anti-politics on the other. “The eclipse of Wall Street in the 1930s,” he wrote,
“saved the United States from a social catastrophe of the Continental type.”
Polanyi rejected both Marxists and economic libertarians for their shared premise that the state should or could wither away.
Marxists assumed the state would be redundant after the workers’ revolution. Libertarians saw (and see) the state as interfering
with the genius of the market. Polanyi embraced democratic politics, both as an end in itself and as the necessary precondition for
taming the economy. Despite his gloomy rendering of history, Polanyi remained an optimist.
Block and Somers also re-examine Polanyi’s research. A key section of The Great Transformation pivots on a local English
ordinance known as the Speenhamland law, which Polanyi treats as an emblematic shift in emergent capitalism. Approved by the
justices of Berkshire County at a May 6, 1795, meeting, Speenhamland increased the worker protections of the old Elizabethan
Poor Law of 1601. With wages falling, pauperism spreading, unrest increasing, and the English gentry all too aware of
revolutionary events across the Channel in France, the law provided that any worker who could not earn enough to feed his
family was entitled to supplemental relief from the local parish tied to the price of bread—“a minimum income should be assured
to the poor irrespective of their earning.”
But the law, like a badly designed modern welfare program, backfired. Many employers reduced wages, knowing that the parish
would make up the difference. Some workers, disdaining the wretched pay on offer, became idlers. Costs to taxpayers increased.
The dysfunctional system led to outcries from welfare reformers of the day, culminating in the infamous report of the 1832 Royal
Commission, which, in turn, led directly to the reform of 1834 and the poorhouse.
Block and Somers find that Polanyi overstated the ubiquity of the Speenhamland system. In practice, poor-relief formulas in
England varied widely. What Polanyi did not overstate was the dislocation of the working poor—first by the enclosure
movement, then by the industrial revolution—and the perverse response of economic liberals.
A weakness of the Block-Somers book is that several chapters are based on published journal articles, insufficiently blended into
a new whole. As a consequence, the tone is uneven, and the book has a fair amount of repetition. Nor do Block and Somers offer
much on Polanyi’s personal journey. They include just four pages of summary on his life. The British social scientist Gareth
Dale, author of the fine 2010 book Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, and Berkeley Fleming of Mount Allison University in
Canada are currently working on the first comprehensive Polanyi biographies.
Fortunately, a good deal on the connection between Polanyi’s life and his work has already been written by his daughter and
literary executor, Kari Polanyi Levitt, an emerita professor at McGill University in Montreal. In Polanyi Levitt’s most recent
book, From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization, she provides fascinating new material on Polanyi’s debate
with Mises and Hayek. From the time he worked at the Österreichische Volkswirt in the mid-1920s, Polanyi engaged Mises and
Hayek both ideologically and technically, arguing over pricing mechanisms under democratic socialism and the emergent
dangers of the libertarian system then strangling Europe’s postwar recovery. Polanyi viewed Mises and Hayek as modern
counterparts of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, punishers of the poor in the name of
market incentives. “Inside and outside England,” he wrote in The Great Transformation, “from Macaulay to Mises, from Spencer
to Sumner, there was not a militant [free-market] liberal who did not express his conviction that popular democracy was a danger
to capitalism.”
Hayek contended in The Road to Serfdom that even democratic forms of state planning were bound to end in the totalitarianism
of a Stalin or a Hitler. But 70 years later, there is not a single case of social democracy leading to dictatorship, while there are
dozens of tragic episodes of market excess destroying democracy. “The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal
capitalism,” Polanyi wrote, “can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all
democratic institutions.” Polanyi surely had the better of the argument. But Hayek had more influence over prevailing ideology
and practice. Polanyi and Marx might converge on the inference that Hayek’s views were more useful to the ruling class.
Though slow to win recognition, The Great Transformation became a modern classic. After the neoliberal assault on the grand
compromise of the late 1940s, Polanyi seemed not just prescient but prophetic. Because he was a political organizer, journalist,
self-taught historian, and economist, Polanyi, in moral philosopher Albert Hirschman’s metaphor, could be a trespasser across
academic disciplines. Though Polanyi is one of the most cited of social scientists, he is not widely read among economists. The
mainstream of the profession has largely stopped teaching the history of economic ideas. Nor do most economists today study the
relationship of economics to politics and social history.
Like other free spirits such as Hirschman, Joseph Schumpeter, or John Kenneth Galbraith, Polanyi had relatively few graduate
students, and there is no formal Polanyi “school.” Rather, a wide spectrum of thinkers found their way to him. He’s prized by
social historians and economic sociologists, and his brand of inquiry fits squarely into the tradition of American institutional
economics associated with John R. Commons and the great debunker of free-market cant, Thorstein Veblen. Since 1988, thanks
to the efforts of his daughter Kari and her colleague Marguerite Mendell, there has been an active Karl Polanyi Institute of
Political Economy, which holds regular conferences, including an anniversary event planned for this fall.
A 1982 article by the international-relations scholar John Gerard Ruggie helped rekindle interest in The Great Transformation.
Ruggie, paying homage to Polanyi, refers to the great postwar social compromise as “embedded liberalism,” meaning it squared
the circle of a basically capitalist (liberal) economy with plenty of social protections (embedded). A few social scientists of the
first rank, including the late sociologist Daniel Bell, political historians Ira Katznelson and Jacob Hacker, and economists Joseph
Stiglitz, Dani Rodrik, and Herman Daly, explicitly cite their intellectual debt to Polanyi. Paradoxically, Polanyi also appeals to
some Burkean conservatives, with their regard for the social order. John Gray, a recovering Thatcherite and author of the best-
selling critique of neoliberalism False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, is effusive in his praise of Polanyi. Martin
Anderson, advising Ronald Reagan on welfare reform, drew extensively (if misleadingly) on Polanyi to warn that the wrong sort
of poor relief backfires. Yale political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott, author of notable books on the failures of
grandiose state projects, said in a 2010 interview that he read The Great Transformation the summer before starting graduate
school, “and I think it is, in some ways, the most important book I’ve ever read. … The struggle that Polanyi points to is a
struggle that we’re still engaged in.”
At the same time, many public intellectuals working in the tradition of Polanyi don’t have him on their conceptual maps. Michael
Walzer’s classic Spheres of Justice, on necessary boundaries between market and non-market institutions, is quintessential
Polanyi, but Walzer never mentions him. Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist whose work on strategies to avoid environmental
catastrophe—the modern tragedy of the commons—made her among the first non-economists to win the Nobel Prize in
Economics, echoes Polanyi but doesn’t invoke him. In reading the works of Galbraith, the consummate historical and
institutional economist of the 20th century, one searches in vain for Polanyi.
As more of us are having second thoughts about the second coming of the primal market, it is as if Polanyi is somewhere in the
ether. Rereading Polanyi at a time when events vindicate his vision, one has to be struck with the eerie contemporary ring.
Polanyi is startlingly 21st-century in addressing how the private rule of global finance puts public policy in a straitjacket. Back in
the era of the gold standard, if a government tried to combat unemployment, Polanyi wrote, “any governmental measure that
caused a budgetary deficit might start a depreciation of the currency.” That analysis could describe contemporary Argentina or
Indonesia, except that the discipline of today’s bond market is even more relentless than the classical gold standard.
Polanyi also sounds like today’s news when he explains how the state’s doing the bidding of private capital (rather than providing
a democratic counterweight) undermines politics. In the 1830s, he explains, the British state served the interests of the rising
merchant class. The result, he wrote, was “the hatred of public relief, the distrust of state action, the insistence on respectability
and self-reliance” on the part of the English working class. He could be describing members of the Tea Party, the same
demographic that once voted in large numbers for FDR, and the tendency of citizens throughout the West to give up on
governments in the pockets of the rich.
The European Union’s austerity follies are recapitulating the perverse policies of the 1920s and inviting the same brand of know-
nothing backlash. In the upcoming elections to the European Parliament, voters disgusted with the failure of politics to remedy
the prolonged recession are poised to deliver big gains to nationalist far-right parties. In Polanyi’s beloved Budapest, where he
and Ilona are buried, the right already governs.
His discussion of the influence of ideas, likewise, is all too contemporary. In the 1920s, as in the 1830s, the intellectual
dominance of free-market economists gave elites pseudo—scientific cover to pursue brutal and perverse policies, with a studied
myopia about real-world consequences. In our own time, market fundamentalism is again the dominant ideology. The latest great
transformation, from a balanced social market economy to a dictatorship of the invisible hand, has weakened the power of the
polity to restore balance and undermined the confidence of the working and middle classes in the use of the democratic state to
counter market excess. One must hope, with the optimistic Polanyi, that capitalism can be fixed.
*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece referred to George Canning as "Lord Canning." George Canning's wife
was given the title of "Lady" after his death, and thus he was not referred to as "Lord" during his lifetime.
**CORRECTION: An earlier version of this piece stated that the family’s surname was magyarized in the 1890s; it was
magyarized in 1905 after Mihaly Pollacsek's death.
RECONSIDERING THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT OF KARL POLANYI IN 2009
ADAM LARRAGY
Senior Sophister
Economists and their theories, like governments, come and go. But during
times of change, in particular, people are wont to look to the past to shed
light on current challenges. In this essay, Adam Larragy examines Karl
Polanyi’s critique of market liberalism in general and the self-regulating
market in particular. Polanyi’s advocacy of a democratic socially planned
economy flies in the face of the last twenty years’ experience, but - along
with the ever-changing relationship between political ideology and the
market – this is worth reassessing in light of recent global events.
Introduction
The above statement, an extract from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, would
have sounded discordant and out of sync with what J.K Galbraith called the ‘conventional
wisdom’ if it had been quoted only one year ago.
Karl Polanyi, economic historian and anthropologist, was born in Budapest in 1886 and
grew up among a radical bourgeois Jewish intellectual milieu in which he played an
active role. Polanyi moved to Vienna in the 1920s and it was here that he was introduced
to the ideas of Mises and Hayek, who were engaged in a project to rehabilitate market
liberalism (Polanyi, 2001: xx). Polanyi formulated his critique of market liberalism in
response to their ideas, and advocated a democratically planned socialist economy on the
grounds of ‘social and moral superiority’ rather than efficiency (Humphreys, 1969: 169).
With the ascent of the Nazis in 1933, Polanyi’s Judaism and socialism made his position
in Vienna untenable and he was forced to resign from the newspaper Der Osterreichische
Volkswirt. He immigrated to England where, like many socialists of his generation, he
became involved in adult education, lecturing with the Workers’ Educational
Association. In the 1940s, he was a visiting scholar to Bennington College in Vermont,
where he wrote The Great Transformation. He was appointed visiting Professor of
Economics at Columbia University in 1947 where he taught General Economic History,
characteristically redefining it as ‘the place occupied by economic life in society’
(Polanyi, 1971: v). At Columbia, he studied the economic aspects of institutional growth,
producing Trade and Market in Early Empires (1957).
Polanyi is usually placed within the institutional school of economic theory, and his
former students have made a strong case for Polanyi to be considered one of the key
contributors to the ‘old institutional’ school (Stanfield, 1980; Fusfeld, 1988). The key
concern of institutionalism is the impact of human institutions on economic behaviour.
However, it must be noted there is a dividing line between the ‘new institutionalism’ of
Douglass North and Ronald Coase and the ‘old institutionalism’ of Polanyi and Thorstein
Weblan; for example, North emphasised that the market economy requires certain
preconditions that can only be provided by the state, private property rights and
constitutional protection of markets while Polanyi believed there was ‘an impossible
separation between markets and politics’ made by market liberals (Davis, 2008: 1102).
The critique of neo-classical economics by the old institutionalists centres around what
they see as the key mistake of separating man from his surrounding institutions, whether
it is the state or any other social institutions created by man. Though such an analysis
1
Notably, China still controls capital flows.
would usually be classed as political economy, many of the old institutionalists would
have viewed this approach as the only way to analyse economics. Commenting
favourably on Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, noted institutionalist
Warren J. Samuels asserts ‘the inseparability of economy and politics, that is, the reality
of a legal-economic nexus’ (Samuels, 1985: 67). In terms of Polanyi’s economic thought,
The Great Transformation is his formulation of this critique, and constitutes his response
to Hayek and Mises and what he saw as their fatal conceit, the belief in the self-
regulating market.
The Great Transformation was published in 1944 in the same year as Friedreich van
Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, though characteristically of our age, rather more has been
heard of Hayek’s work of political economy in recent years. Polanyi’s argument
constitutes both history and theory, as he and his central European contemporaries
(including Hayek) would have seen any attempt to construct theory without history as
impossible. The book is divided into three parts; the first an account of the ‘international
system’ resulting from the ‘Great Transformation’ of the nineteenth-century in which the
market economy came to dominate Western societies and, through imperialist conquest,
the world. The second part constitutes a historical narrative of the ‘rise and fall of the
market economy’ (drawing on his historical research into English economic and social
life while teaching in the 1930s). The third is a commentary on ‘transformation in
progress’ in reference to current and future processes, from his contemporary viewpoint,
such as the rise of fascism and possibly of socialism.
Economic Man
As previously noted, the key to classical and neo-classical economic theory is the idea of
‘economic man’: a being whose utility-maximising behaviour enables the market
mechanism to function by responding to price changes rationally, thus allowing the co-
ordination of supply and demand. The historical origins of the concept can be traced
further back than Adam Smith (usually Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees) but his
observation that man’s nature is to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ is its most famous
expression (cited in Polanyi, 2001: 45). This concept was based on ideas of how man
would behave in a state of nature (in a curious parallel to Rousseau, though with the
opposite implications) and as such could be examined in historical terms. Polanyi, who
had an interest in early economies, opposed the concept by claiming that ‘economic
motives spring from social life’ (ibid.: 49).
He contended that empirical evidence showed that early societies tended to organise their
economic life around four principles: reciprocity, redistribution, householding (using
Aristotle’s definition of oeconomica as ‘production for use’) and barter whose
corresponding patterns were symmetry, centricity, autarky and the market pattern
respectively (ibid.: 55). Polanyi reversed the classical view that man’s ‘propensity to
barter’ leads to local markets, the division of labour, foreign trade and eventually long-
distance trade. Even in the case of long-distance trade, barter was embedded in relations
bounded and regulated by custom, magic and religion whereas ‘national markets’ were a
creation of the powerful centralising monarchies of Western Europe in the 15th and 16th
centuries, driven by the imperatives of war and the need to unify their kingdoms.
The industrial revolution of the 19th century, with the introduction of the factory system
into a commercial society, may have enabled the development of the vision of ‘economic
man’, but everywhere this was contradicted by the mutualism of rural areas, of the new
trade union and Chartist movements (ibid.: 78). Polanyi located the modern conception of
‘economic man’ in Joseph Townsend’s Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786), in which
Townsend infamously claimed men were beasts and subject to the same laws of Nature;
in Smith’s formulation there was never any question that moral law and political life were
excluded from the self-interested butcher’s life (ibid.: 117). Malthus, Ricardo, Burke and
Bentham all believed that ‘economic society was subject to the laws of nature’ (ibid.:
130). Polanyi’s entire historical narrative implicitly affirms the contingency of human
behaviour on history, that is, the contingency of human behaviour on the social, cultural,
political and economic institutions that give rise to social life. ‘The behaviour of man
both in his primitive state and right through the course of history has been almost the
opposite implied in this view [that of the existence of an ahistorical rational man]’ (ibid.:
258).
‘Laissez faire was planned, planning was not’; Polanyi used this phrase to describe the
‘birth of the liberal creed’ in the 1820s, the decade in which it was to take on its full
meaning. Labour must find its price on the market; money should be subject to an
automatic mechanism (the gold standard); and the removal of impediments to the
international free flow of capital and goods should occur (encapsulated in the political
slogan ‘free trade’) (ibid.: 140-144). Central to economic liberalism was the conceit that
land, labour and money were commodities, much the same as any other good or service
produced for exchange. This presented both an intellectual and in the case of land and
labour, a moral problem; the commodity labour is of course work provided by human
beings, who by their very nature (which does not correlate historically with that of
rational optimising man) cannot be expected to behave as a commodity. Land is the
natural substance of the world and the basis for man’s existence rather than a commodity.
European economic life in regard to land and labour was embedded in social life until the
19th century; feudal relations or older custom rights were prevalent on the land and land
was often held in common. In England, elaborate social legislation under the Elizabethan
Poor Laws, the Statute of Artificers and the 1662 Act of Settlement regulated economic
life. Legitimised by Malthus’ Law of Population, Ricardo’s ‘iron law of wages’ and
Benthamite utilitarianism (which provides what amounts to the ‘moral philosophy’
element within classical economics) the creation of a labour market was accomplished by
means of the 1834 New Poor Law, which ‘for the sake of industry’ removed any succour
for those deemed capable of working (ibid.: 150). Rational man would react to the threat
of starvation and hunger would drive him into the factories and work-houses of the liberal
society (ibid.: 120).
The Gold Standard was the medium by which the market liberals thought to extend the
self-regulating market throughout the world (with the addition of international free trade).
Each nation’s currency being backed by gold, a deficit in the balance of payments of a
country would lead to gold flowing out of that nation leading to a contraction in the
money supply, rise in interest rates, fall in prices and wages and thus a rise in exports. At
least that was the theory. By the 1850s the four institutions of the 19th century could be
fully discerned: a balance of power between nations, the liberal state, the gold standard,
and the self-regulating market. Polanyi emphasised that ‘budgets and armaments, foreign
trade and raw material supplies, national independence and sovereignty were now the
function of currency and credit’ (ibid.: 18).
However, Polanyi asserted that as soon as the economy was ‘disembedded’ from
economic life, a counter movement emerged which had diverse origins. The decade of
the introduction of the New Poor Law saw the rise of the first working-class political
movements, the Chartists. In the 1830s industrialist Robert Owen experimented with new
co-operative organisations and in this decade the formation of the modern trade union
movement, which arose to protect working-class people, is discernable. Market liberals
such as von Mises and ‘social Darwinist’ and liberal Herbert Spencer identified the
decades of the 1870s and the 1880s as those in which the counter-movement became
discernible, and they termed them the ‘collectivist’ decades. The introduction of social
insurance in Germany was a response to the rise of the Social Democratic party and trade
unions and recognition of the need to protect labour. In Britain, following the defeat of
the Chartists the trade union movement was less political than their continental
counterpart, but it still achieved official recognition.
Polanyi contested that the forces of countermovement arose from the mistaken treatment
of land, labour and money as commodities and the attempted creation of a self-regulating
market and the integration of said ‘fictitious commodities’ into that market. He identified
the ‘conservative 1920s’ as an era in which governments attempted to return to the pre-
war world of the gold standard and free trade. This placed such a strain on society that the
counter-movement took the form of fascism, which ‘emerged as an alternative solution to
the problem of industrial society’ (ibid.:250).
Polanyi believed that socialism was the only moral response to the failure of the self-
regulating market, and possibly saw the New Deal continuing after the Second World
War, providing a basis for a new society. He identified socialism as simply ‘the tendency
inherent in an industrial civilisation to transcend the self-regulating market by
consciously subordinating it to a democratic society’ (ibid.: 242). The post-war world in
the West was indeed constructed on the basis of a controlled currency system (Bretton
Woods), and widespread control of the labour market by means of nationalisation of
industry and the creation of the welfare state - though it fell somewhat short of Polanyi’s
vision.
Conclusion
It is important to remember, given the current crisis, that Polanyi - a refugee fleeing
fascism - recognised fascism as offering an alternative to liberal capitalism, but one that
rejected ‘the postulate of freedom… and of the oneness of mankind’ (a tradition he
ascribes to Christianity) while ‘[glorifying] power which is the reality of society’ (ibid.:
268). It is worth quoting the final lines of The Great Transformation, which could be said
to offer a prescient rejoinder to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and guidance for today’s
economic policymakers and politicians:
Bernanke, B. 2004. ‘The Great Moderation’. Retrieved from The Federal Reserve Board:
http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2004/20040220/default.htm
Davis, A. 2008. ‘Endogenous Institutions and the Politics of Property: Comparing and
Contrasting Douglass North and Karl Polanyi in the Case of Finance’. Journal of
Economic Issues 42:4:1101-1122.
Dumenil, G. & Levy, D. 2004. ‘Neo-liberal Income Trends: Wealth, Class and
Ownership in the USA’. New Left Review 30:105-133.
Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Humphreys, S.C. 1969. ‘History, Economics and Anthropology: The Work of Karl
Polanyi’. History and Theory 8:2:165-212.
Polanyi, K. 2001. [1944]. The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins
of our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.
Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C.M., & Pearson, H.W. (eds.). 1971. [1957]. Trade and Market
in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory. Chicago: Regnery.
Samuels, W.J. 1985. ‘A Critique of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’ in R.D. Coe
& C.K. Wilber (eds.) Capitalism and Democracy: Schumpeter Revisited. Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press.
Schaniel, W.C. 1993.‘The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State and Society at the end
of the Twentieth Century (Book Review)’. Journal of Economic Issues 27:3:981-985.
Stanfield, R.J. 1980. ‘The Institutional Economics of Karl Polanyi’. Journal of Economic
Issues 14:3:593-614.
Wade, R. 2006. ‘Choking the South’. New Left Review 38:115-127.
Correspondence: kgemici@ucla.edu
While Polanyi argues that all economies are embedded and enmeshed in social
relations and institutions, he tends to see market economy as disembedded,
which reveals a tension in his thought. The main motivation for this paper is to
understand the origins of this tension. On the basis of a systematic formulation
of Polanyi’s work, it is argued that Polanyi employs embeddedness in a dual
manner: (a) as a methodological principle akin to methodological holism, and
(b) as a theoretical proposition on the changing place of economy in society.
These two formulations of embeddedness contradict each other. After tracing
out the origins of this contradiction, this paper concludes by considering the
implications of this analysis for economic sociology. It is argued that embedded-
ness as a methodological principle is the only acceptable usage of the term. Yet, in
this capacity, embeddedness falls short of economic sociology’s goal of providing
a theoretical alternative to neoclassical economics.
Keywords: embeddedness, economic systems, economic sociology
JEL classification: A12 relation of economics to other disciplines, B25 historical,
institutional, evolutionary, Austrian history of economic thought, Z10 cultural
economics, economic sociology, economic anthropology
1. Introduction
Schumpeter (1954, p. 21), in a frequently quoted passage, presents the intellectual
division of labour between economics and economic sociology in the following
manner: ‘Economic analysis deals with the questions how people behave at any
time and what the economic effects are they produce by so behaving; economic
sociology deals with the question how they came to behave as they do’.
Karl Polanyi would disagree. He would argue that the real distinction between
economics and any other social science concerned with economic life is that
economics dictates an image of the economy derived from a utopian ideal on
# The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.
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6 K. Gemici
1
The following abbreviations are used for Polanyi’s works: GT, The Great Transformation; TM, Trade
and Market in the Early Empires; PAME, Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl
Polanyi, edited by George Dalton; LM, The Livelihood of Man.
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 7
GT, pp. 60–61). It is not the case that one interpretation grasps what Polanyi really
meant; there is sufficient support for both.
The contrast between embedded and disembedded economic systems arises
in the most dichotomous manner in the writings of Polanyi’s followers in econo-
mic anthropology. Their research programme exerted considerable influence in
the 1970s and 80s and was marginalized in the 1990s in economic anthropology
2
However, as early as the first half of the 1970s, the emerging consensus rejected the more extreme
assertions by the followers of Polanyi. As Firth (1972, p. 470) observes: ‘It has now become clear
that the original issue, as it took shape between “substantivists” and “formalists” . . . as to whether
economic theory could be applied to primitive economies, was largely sterile. The issue was rather
where, how far, and with what modifications and additions economic theory could be found
appropriate to interpret “primitive” systems’.
3
Polanyi and his substantivist approach to economic life exerted an even larger and more important
influence in classical studies, especially through Finley’s adoption of Polanyian analysis (Finley, 1973,
1975). A discussion of Polanyi’s influence, particularly in the analysis of the ancient Greek economy,
would be of considerable value in highlighting the fertility as well as the shortcomings of his research
programme. See Humphreys (1978), Moseley and Wallerstein (1978), Figueira (1984), Mann (1986),
Nafissi (2004) and Morris and Manning (2005).
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 9
Embedded Disembedded
All economies are embedded since The degree of embeddedness changes from one type of
economic life is a socially instituted society to another, depending on how the economy is
and organized process integrated. If integrated as a result of operations with
non-market ends, it is embedded. If integrated as a
result of operations with strictly market ends, it moves
towards being disembedded through the commodifi-
cation of labour, land and money
10 K. Gemici
4
Barber (1995, p. 400) offers the following comment on the gradational view of embeddedness: ‘While
Polanyi’s analysis of the different types of economic exchange is very valuable, as we have seen, he is
less helpful, indeed misleading, when he goes on to discuss the matter of their differential
embeddedness. Polanyi describes the market as ‘disembedded,’ the other two types of economic
exchange as more ‘embedded’ in the other social-structural and cultural-structural elements of
society’.
5
I should mention four additional works in this context: Jenkins (1977), Dupré and Philippe-Rey
(1978), Booth (1994) and Block (2003). These authors develop important lines of criticism and
anticipate some of the arguments I advance. Yet, with the exception of Block (2003), none of the
articles investigate the origins of the ambiguity in the embeddedness concept.
6
It is remarkable that despite the importance of embeddedness, I know of no analysis that investigates
the development of the term in Polanyi’s thought. Barber (1995) gives a history of the concept, but he
does not delve into where Polanyi’s idea originates. Krippner (2001) advances an ‘historical sociology
of concept formation’ but her argument is a critique of how the concept is used in new economic
sociology; thus, she just traces out how Granovetter (1985) builds his own formulation.
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 11
7
The intellectual roots of Polanyi’s thought would take a study in themselves. See Drucker (1979),
Polanyi-Levitt (1987), Vezér (1990) and Duczynska (2000) for the influence of family on Polanyi’s
intellectual development and a general sketch of his life. It should be observed that these sources
are not always consistent on the details of Polanyi’s life. See Humphreys (1969) and Gábor (2000)
for Polanyi’s activities in the Galilei Circle. Polanyi’s socialism in his school years and in exile in
the early part of his life is discussed by Litván (1990, 1991) and Múcsi (1990). Humphreys (1969)
remains the best discussion of the origins of Polanyi’s thought in his early utopianism and
romanticism (despite the relations, her suggestions are not universally accepted). Congdon (1990),
Mendell (1990) and Rosner (1990) trace the influence of G. D. H. Cole’s Fabianism and guild
socialism on Polanyi; they further offer highly informative readings of Polanyi’s writings and
participation in the socialist planning debate during his stay in Vienna in the early 1920s.
Additional sources on Polanyi’s Vienna years can be found in McRobbie and Polanyi-Levitt (2000).
The impact of Polanyi’s years in England on the subsequent development of his thought can be
found in Somers (1990), Hann (1992) and Duczynska (2000). The relation between Polanyi’s ethics
and his historical scholarship is analysed in detail by Baum (1996). See Polanyi-Levitt (1990) and
Salsano (1990) for a discussion of the place of The Great Transformation in Polanyi’s thought.
8
As his wife, Duczynska (2000, p. 311) writes: ‘Stronger than any intellectual influence was the trauma
which was England. It was his encounter with full-fledged capitalism—of which he had imagined that
we knew all that is worth knowing! Yet the houses which Engels had described were still standing;
people still lived in them. Black hills of slag stood in the green landscape of Wales; from the
depressed areas, young men and women who had never seen their parents employed, drifted away
to London’.
12 K. Gemici
are interpreted through the historical forces that led to the rise and fall of the
market system.9
In The Great Transformation, Polanyi undertakes an interpretation of the
transformation of modern civilization in the 19th century and its inevitable col-
lapse in the 20th century.10 Polanyi’s main thesis is that the institutional foun-
dations of 19th century civilization (i.e. the balance-of-power system, the
9
See Hexter (1945), Williams (1945), Hildebrand (1946) and Humphreys (1969). The following quote
from Drucker (1979, p. 136) is illuminating in understanding the role of historical analysis in The
Great Transformation, despite its slight exaggeration: ‘Economic history was, however, only the
vehicle for Karl’s search for the alternative to capitalism and communism, and for a society that
would provide at the same time economic growth and stability, freedom and equality’. Further
evidence on this point is given by Polanyi himself in The Great Transformation (p. 4): ‘Ours is not
historical work; what we are searching for is not a convincing sequence of outstanding events, but
an explanation of their trend in terms of human institutions. We shall feel free to dwell on scenes
of the past with the sole object of throwing light on matters of the present’.
10
Since there are excellent discussions of the historical narrative of the book, I focus on the structure of
Polanyi’s theoretical analysis at the expense of simplifying the historical analysis. See especially Block
and Somers (1984). Sievers (1949) has a very detailed account of Polanyi’s historical analysis.
11
In his words (GT, p. 135): ‘For a century the dynamics of modern society was governed by a double
movement: the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement
checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the
protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self-regulation of the market,
and thus with the market system itself’.
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 13
‘elaborate . . . specific machinery and plant’ (GT, pp. 77– 78). This intensifies
specialization; thus, it requires long-term investment for the continuation of pro-
duction, which leads to the evolution of the merchant into the industrial capital-
ist. Industrial production with specific machinery and plants requires a
continuous supply of factors of production, the most important of which are
land, labour and money. Such necessity implies that the ‘elements of indus-
12
Historical developments that led to the rise of the market system—the creation of ‘one big market’—
are complex, as can be seen in Polanyi’s historical analysis. However, commodification is the hub of the
rise of the market system. Polanyi makes this point clear in his posthumously published The Livelihood
of Man (1977, p. 10) by identifying commodification of land and labour as ‘the crucial step’ in the
transmutation from ‘isolated markets’ into ‘a self-regulating system’.
14 K. Gemici
organization of production under the market system does not rely on the inter-
ference of other social institutions such as household and manor; accordingly, it is
not ‘regulated’ by social institutions other than the market.13 The economy
becomes ‘institutionally separated’ from other social institutions (GT, pp. 74,
205, 220).
Such an organization of production—which is self-regulating, based on the
13
See Garlan (1973) for an excellent reconstruction of the self-regulation idea in Polanyi. In her
colourful language (1973, p. 120): ‘L’économie est, dans ce contexte [l’économie de marché],
comme une machine qui tourne par elle-même et pour elle-même: nous vivons à son heure’.
14
See Hildebrand (1946), Humphreys (1969), Kindleberger (1973), Block and Somers (1984), Baum
(1996), Hejeebu and McCloskey (1999) and Block (2001) on the importance of the concept of
commodification in explaining the market system’s destructive impact on the fabric of society.
Baum (1996, p. 4) is especially clear on this point; as he puts it: ‘Polanyi analyses the destructive
impact of the new economic system by focusing on the transformation of labour and land into
market commodities’. See also his comments on the centrality of the idea of the self-regulating
market in Polanyi’s thought (p. 5).
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 15
separation. For Polanyi, markets always clear and they are dominated by the gain
motive, with the important qualification that its mechanism functions only in the
case of ‘real’ commodities (Block, 2001). Accordingly, markets for real commodi-
ties are separated from other social institutions. In other words, the institutional
separation does not directly result from commodification, but from the logic of
the market. The moment of institutional separation in modern society comes
when isolated markets become ‘one big market’ incorporating labour, land and
money as fictitious commodities; this is when the economy is disembedded
from society. Yet, such separation is a utopian project rather than the reality.
The classical political economy of Ricardo and Malthus wanted to attain this
ideal of markets governing all areas of social life, but the idea never reached
maturity since society interferes through regulation. The separation of the
market system from society was never complete. Table 3 summarizes Polanyi’s
argument in The Great Transformation.
historical studies occurs in his later work. Here, unlike in The Great Transforma-
tion, embeddedness takes a central role.
The above passage elucidates the conceptual pillars upon which Polanyi builds
social tissue and position, but from the bare motives of hunger and gain (PAME,
p. 82; LM, Chapter 4).
Furthermore, under the influence of Tönnies (1957 [1887]), Polanyi views
status as characteristic of community (Gemeinschaft) and contract as characteri-
stic of society (Gesellschaft) (PAME, pp. 82 – 84; LM, pp. 48 – 49). As a result,
Polanyi establishes an equation between status/community, contract/society,
Embedded Disembedded
pp. 68 – 69). In economic life, ‘The means, not the wants, are material’; human
beings seek material gain and possessions for social purposes (PAME, p. 65;
LM, p. 20; GT, p. 48).
To overcome the limitations of rationality and atomism, Polanyi distinguishes
between substantive and formal meanings of the term ‘economic’. The distinction
contrasts the use of the term to denote human activity in securing a living with
16
For an interpretation of Aristotle from the viewpoint of modern economics, see Schumpeter (1954).
Finley (1970), who agrees with Polanyi’s interpretation of Aristotle, rightly criticizes Schumpeter for
reading Aristotle through the lens of modern economics.
22 K. Gemici
pp. 226 – 227): ‘All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an indi-
vidual through a specific form of society. . . . In production the members of society
appropriate (create, shape) the products of nature in accord with human needs’
[my emphasis].
However, Polanyi also shows an attempt to move beyond the emphasis on
material production by stressing that this activity is culturally instituted. He con-
Elements of analysis
17
See also Barber (1995, pp. 400 –401) on this point: ‘While the modern market system may appear to
be more differentiated from other social system structures, somewhat more concretely separate, this
image diverts attention from the basic fact of its multiple and complex interdependence with the
rest of the social system. Calling the market “disembedded” leads analytic attention away from just
what this interdependence is. Insofar as the market is considered coterminous with all economic
exchange, it leads attention away, further, from looking for the existence of some amount of
reciprocal and redistributive exchange in so-called market economies and away from understanding
how the three types co-exist and interact. It gives the market a false kind of analytic as well as
concrete independence. And this image of the market may lead to yet a further common error: that
the market is not only disembedded and independent but also that it is the part of society which
determines all the rest. This absolutization of the market, this implicit reductionism, leads on to
the analytical and concrete errors of seeing the market and its close theoretical companion, rational
choice, as the sole explanations of social behavior’.
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 27
how social factors enable and structure human action.18 At its worst, embedded-
ness misguides economic sociology if it is taken as anything other than an abstract
methodological principle, as can be witnessed by the common interpretation of
embeddedness as indicating that ‘economic’ is submerged in ‘social’. The
concept of embeddedness is thus limited.
To be sure, embeddedness is useful as a method of inquiry into economic life.
18
See Beckert (2003, p. 796) on this point: ‘It has been given little notice, however, that the critique of
the economic model of action on one hand and the sociological concept of embeddedness on the other
are situated on two different conceptual levels. While the former refers to the question of how to
conceive of the structure of action, the latter tells us about external variables which influence the
action process and outcome’.
19
Hence, as Collins (n.d.) recognizes, the radical challenge to mainstream economics does not come
from the embeddedness paradigm. Instead, it comes from economic sociologists such as Zelizer (1997)
and White (1981, 1993), who ‘go beyond embedding’ and develop sociological frameworks on the
‘home grounds’ of mainstream economics (Collins, n.d.). Not incidentally, these are the rare
approaches in sociology that can offer alternative answers to fundamental economic questions such
as economic value and the operation of markets.
Polanyi and the antinomies of embeddedness 29
Acknowledgements
The author thanks César Ayala, Ahu Gemici, Robert Jansen, Greta Krippner,
Michael Mann, Gabrielle Raley, Bill Roy and two anonymous reviewers for
suggestions, criticisms and other help.
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In Ortiz, S. (ed) Economic Anthropology, Lanham, MD, University Press of America,
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McRobbie, K. and Polanyi-Levitt, K. (eds) (2000) Karl Polanyi in Vienna: The Contempor-
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Mendell, M. (1990) ‘Karl Polanyi and Feasible Socialism’. In Polanyi-Levitt, K. (ed) The Life
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