The Great Transformation — 75 Years Later — Oleg Komlik

Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece The Great Transformation was written during the Second World War and published in 1944, but the relevance and importance of this preeminent book has continued to grow. 75 year later, The Great Transformation — an admirable treatise debunking the false creed of economic determinism and market fundamentalism, and elaborating on their hazardous ramifications — remains fresh and enlightening, and it is indispensable for understanding the current phenomena of our turbulent time. The book was slow in arriving at public and scholarly domains, but has kept on surfacing and then gradually become a canonical text and highly influential research in social science and humanities. Since the 1980s, this Polanyi’s classic work and his other writings have greatly inspired and impelled the rebirth and development of economic sociology, political economy and history of capitalism....

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
The Great Transformation — 75 Years Later
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies

Robert Kuttner — Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Weekend reading.

The American Prospect
Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Robert Kuttner

Daniel Luban — The Elusive Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi had thought of calling his magnum opus Origins of the Cataclysm, or The Liberal Utopia, or Freedom from Economics. His publisher, worried about the book’s marketability, instead gave it the title by which it eventually became famous: The Great Transformation. It was an ambiguous phrase. Readers might imagine that “the great transformation” refers to the history the book traces: the imposition, equally utopian and violent, of the market economy upon a recalcitrant society, spreading from England to encompass the globe and ultimately bringing on the collapse of world order in the twentieth century. But for Polanyi the great transformation lay not in the past but in the future. It referred not to the coming of market liberalism but of socialism, understood as “the tendency inherent in an industrial civilization to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to a democratic society.” And this transformation would be the culmination of the dynamic that he famously called the “double movement,” in which the ravages of the market inevitably lead society to “protect itself” against depredation....

Dissent — Spring 2017
The Elusive Karl Polanyi

Daniel Luban, postdoctoral associate in the humanities at Yale University

ht David Fields at Radical Political Economy

Brad DeLong — Wanted: A Readable Polanyi…

Important.

For almost my entire adult life–since I was a sophomore, IIRC–I have thought that the key social theorist for our age is neither Marx nor Mill nor Toqueville nor Weber nor Durkheim, but rather John Maynard Keynes. Now I think, I am slowly swinging around to thinking that the key social theorist is Karl Polanyi. The problem is that Polanyi writes so damnably badly–a fault he shares with, among others, Hyman Minsky. Just as Charlie Kindleberger is a much better Minsky than Minsky is, we need a much better Polanyi than Polanyi…

I tried my hand, with some but not adequate success:

Grasping Reality
Wanted: A Readable Polanyi…
Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics, UCAL Berkeley

Oleg Komlik — Karl Polanyi on the Rise of Fascism and Market Economy

Karl Polanyi was deeply concerned by the essence of Fascism and focused on the institutional structure from which Fascism starts its march. He devoted the final parts of his magnum opus The Great Transformation specifically to this crucial topic and elaborated a bright analysis of the dark rise of Fascism between the two world wars. 

The following passage is composed from excerpts I selected from this insightful classic book and assembled them as a short article. I urge you to delve into this piece (and then to read the full original chapters) and to mull over the substance of fascist situations and moves, as well as their linkage to free market and economy of self-interest, which generate anti-individualistic and repressing endeavors directed to change not only the political sphere and societal fabrics, but human consciousness itself.

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
Karl Polanyi on the Rise of Fascism and Market Economy
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies

Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal — Karl Polanyi for President

This is making a splash. Polanyi, like Minsky, may be getting a second life. They were not well known in their time but both are being resurrected as prophets now.

Should health care and education be rights, or products that those with enough money can purchase in markets? About seventy-five years ago, in response to the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered, through the programs of the New Deal, an expanded definition of freedom founded on economic security—immortalized as “freedom from want” in his famous speech of 1941. In our own time, severe inequality and the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression have once again brought the issue of what should count as a right to the surface of political debate.

One candidate, Bernie Sanders, has argued explicitly that health care and education—two things that the New Deal mostly left alone—should be rights and therefore accessible to all. While public policy pundits fight over the specifics, they miss that Sanders, by discussing these things as rights instead of just policies, has changed the nature of the debate. This key distinction helps explain why tens of thousands have turned out to Sanders rallies across the country—not to mention the millions who have supported him online and at the polls—demonstrating enthusiasm for a politics that he explicitly identifies as “democratic socialism.” But what kind of socialism?

The vast majority of Sanders’s supporters are not Marxists clamoring for a dictatorship of the proletariat or the nationalization of industry. Most are, probably without knowing it, secret followers of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi’s classic, The Great Transformation, was published in 1944—the same year that FDR promised a “Second Bill of Rights” guaranteeing employment, housing, social security, medical care, and education to all Americans. Today, Polanyian arguments are once again in the air. Since his ideas seem to be everywhere but he is rarely mentioned, a (re-)introduction to his thinking, and its relevance to politics in 2016, is in order.

Dissent
Karl Polanyi for President
Patrick Iber, assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Passo, and Mike Konczal, fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a contributing editor at Dissent

Robert Kuttner — Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Robert Kuttner provides an excellent summary of Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (download).

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.

Comparison of The Great Transformation with The Road to Serfdom is in a sense the story of what would lead in Anglo-American economics to the conflict between Keynes and Friedman, mediated by Paul Samuelson. The first textbook of Keynesianism was Lorie Tarshis's The Elements of Economics (1947), which was pilloried as "pink" if not "red." Samuelson published his textbook that would become the standard in 1948. Eventually, even Samuelson's "bastard Keynesian," the purported synthesis of Keynes and neoclassical economics was over turned, which was largely attributed to the Chicago School and Milton Friedman. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation was relegated to a footnote whereas the economic liberalism of Hayek and Friedman became dominant. As result, few are familiar with Polanyi's work and fewer still read him.

Now, with economic liberalism in retreat and the moral economy and the good society reentering the debate forcefully, Polanyi's work is also experiencing a resurrection in social and political theory and political economy. Polanyi favored managed capitalism (social democracy) over laissez-faire capitalism based on free market fundamentalism (economic liberalism).

Karl Polanyi is not to be confused with his brother Michael, a chemist and libertarian social and political philosopher. Friedrich Hayek got the concept of spontaneous order from Michael Polanyi. In fairness to Michael, he was, like Hayek, no Murray Rothbard either. Michael made contributions to chemistry for which he is better known than as a political philosopher, and Michael's son John was awarded a Nobel in chemistry. Talented family.

Both Michael and Karl reacted the extremes of Marxism. But Karl rejected Michael's assumption that free market fundamentalism results in spontaneous order that is socially beneficial. Karl attempted to navigate between the free market fundamentalism that conflated economic liberalism with social and political liberalism, and the Marxism that had resulted in totalitarian communism. 

Like Marx, Karl Polanyi's approach was historical, but unlike Marx he did not postulate "iron laws," which he criticized liberal economist for doing also in seeking to model "the market" with purportedly universal laws of a natural system like 18th and 19th century classical physics. Being unnatural such attempts at universalization would naturally lead not only misunderstanding theoretically but also to economic crisis and social discord if applied rigidly. In fact, it led to domestic conflict and war historically.

Looking backward from 1944 to the 18th century, Polanyi saw the catastrophe of the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of laissez-faire taken to an extreme. “The origins of the cataclysm,” he wrote, “lay in the Utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.”

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.”…

Longish but detailed and a good read. If you don't have time to get to it now, save it for the weekend. We are going to hearing a lot more about Polanyi, Keynes, Lerner, and Minsky, etc. as the debate shifts and people wake up to the facts that history rhymes and many of the issues of today have already been analyzed in the past to good effect. There are shoulders of giants to stand on.

The American Prospect
Karl Polanyi Explains It All

Robert Kuttner | co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and Meyer and Ida Kirstein Visiting Professor in Social Planning and Administration at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management

ht Dan Lynch in the comments

Diane Coyle — Better than (Karl) Polany

Above all, the book is historically inaccurate – Deirdre McCloskey is the latest of many people to point this out in her new book, Bourgeois Equality. So if one reads it, it needs to be from a history of thought perspective. Secondly, it’s about social relations and culture, so not central for economics students even though I wholeheartedly agree that economists in general need more hinterland in other areas of social science and history.

It’s also a dense read, and there are better books to recommend to students to introduce them to the social context of markets. I’d say the original Albert Hirschman books have aged better – Exit, Voice and Loyalty for one – and aren’t marred by inaccuracies like The Great Transformation. Of more recent vintage, I think John McMillan’s Reinventing the Bazaar, James Scott’s Seeing Like A State and Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy cover the territory better.

The Enlightened Economist
Better than (Karl) Polanyi
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Peter Radford — Why Trump?

Not really about Trump.

For those of us who value economics as an understanding of a critical part of social reality we must insist that those inhabiting that alternative world take full responsibility for the outcome of their ideas if, and when, those ideas are allowed to seep into actual policy making. They must be blamed. And we ought to demand an explanation as to why the imposition of fanciful ideas onto an unsuspecting world, with the core consequences now becoming apparent, is at all ethical.

You see, Polanyi was right. At least in so far as he projects the blame for extreme politics, in a major part, onto the shoulders of those who advocate policy based upon theories that stand not so much on solid foundations but in midair.

It is not possible now, nor has it ever been, to extract economics form its socio-political context. It is not possible to remove history. Nor is it possible to remove the panoply of institutional, cultural, geographic, intellectual, or technological frameworks within which economic activity takes place. Those things frame every single transaction. They channel them. They constrain them. And they create the pathway along which an economy travels. If we ignore such things then the consequent study is a sterile amoral technical exercise of little practical value.…

The Radford Free Press
Why Trump?
Peter Radford

Asad Zaman — Theories of Knowledge

The following is the foundation on which the argument is built. The whole post is worth reading from the point of view of heterodoxy successfully confronting orthodoxy.

All heterodox economists agree on one thing, by definition of heterodoxy: orthodox economics contains (huge) errors. INSTEAD of explaining what these errors are and trying to fix them, I would like to stand back from the fray and try to examine what is going on from a distance. WHAT makes certain theories popular? WHY do most people come to believe in theories? WHAT causes changes in these beliefs? By studying the Methodology of Polanyi’s Great Transformation, I came to the understanding that theories can only be understood within their historical context. This understanding is violently in conflict with the conception of knowledge, based on positivist ideas, that I learned in the universities. Contrary to positivist ideas, to understand the process of emergence of theories, and how these theories change over time, one has to do analysis at three levels simultaneously:

LEVEL 1: The Historical Facts, the Context, The Various Groups engaged in the struggle for power, and their interests and ideological positions.

LEVEL 2: The THEORIES which are in use by different groups to analyze the historical experience. It is crucial to understand theories as the lens and framework used by different groups to understand history. Theories prescribe actions to be taken, and groups act to shape history in light of understanding furnished by (often false) theories.

LEVEL 3: Rise and fall of theories as a consequence of the shifting sands of political fortunes of different groups, as well as twists and turns of emergent historical events.…
The naive notion about emergence and adoption of theories can be summarized as:

STANDARD (logical positivist) THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE: A theory will be discarded once it is shown to be false. A theory will be adopted if it can be proven to be true.

On the basis of this positivist idea, we try to prove that dominant theories are false, and offer alternatives which we try to prove true. We think that if we are successful in this attempt, our theories will be accepted. Of all people, heterodox economists should be the first to understand that this theory of knowledge is wrong. They are witness to the long standing dominance and widespread acceptance of theories which are obviously false, and easily demonstrated to be wrong. Thus we need to move to a more sophisticated theory of knowledge. Foucault builds on Marx, and provides a very useful improvement.

POWER/KNOWLEDGE: Theories which are aligned with interests of power become accepted. Moreover, acceptance of these theories actually creates power — power and knowledge are entangled.

Thus, acceptance of neoclassical economics is very beneficial to the interests of the rich and powerful, and that is why it is the dominant theory. Universities serve to indoctrinate a select class to serve the interests of power. Based on this understanding of knowledge, we would not waste time trying to convince those in power of the truth and validity of our theories. Instead, we would appeal to those groups whose interests would be served by the theories we are offering as alternatives. We would focus on the benefits of believing our theories more than on the proof of their validity. The bottom 90%, those who are deeply in debt, those who are powerless, would be the natural target audience, who would listen to our theories because they are aligned with their interests.

I think Polanyi’s analysis of emergence and transformation of structures of knowledge goes further than this, and is more complex. We must understand human knowledge as a social construct — it comes into being because we agree to accept it, and consensus emerges. The agreement can be forced by powers that be using coercion and persuasion in different combinations. Truth is helpful in persuasion, and so it does matter, but it is not the only factor which is relevant. Many readings on the relation between power and knowledge are given on my webpage linked.…

Real-World Economics Review Blog
Theories of Knowledge
Asad Zaman | Vice Chancellor, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and former Director General, International Institute of Islamic Economics, International Islamic University Islamabad

Yves Smith — Something That Changed My Perspective: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

The first Christmas-New Years period for this site, in 2007, we featured a series "Something That Changed My Perspective," which presented some things that affected how I viewed the world. The offerings included John Kay on obliquity and Michael Prowse on how income inequality was bad for the health even of the wealthy. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation (which I should have read long ago) is proving to be a particularly potent example of this general phenomenon.…

Naked Capitalism
Something That Changed My Perspective: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation
Yves Smith

Robert Kuttner — Karl Polanyi Explains It All

In November 1933, less than a year after Hitler assumed power in Berlin, a 47-year-old socialist writer on Vienna’s leading economics weekly was advised by his publisher that it was too risky to keep him on the staff. It would be best both for the Österreichische Volkswirt and his own safety if Karl Polanyi left the magazine. Thus began a circuitous odyssey via London, Oxford, and Bennington, Vermont, that led to the publication in 1944 of what many consider the 20th century’s most prophetic work of political economy, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Polanyi, with no academic base, was already a blend of journalist and public intellectual, a major critic of the Austrian School of free-market economics and its cultish leaders, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Polanyi and Hayek would cross swords for four decades—Hayek becoming more influential as an icon of the free-market right but history increasingly vindicating Polanyi.

The American Prospect
Karl Polanyi Explains It All
Robert Kuttner