Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Great Transformation
The nineteenth-century attempt to create a self-regulating market society was utopian; its social consequences led to the countermovements and catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Introduction
Polanyi wrote “The Great Transformation” at Bennington College in Vermont between 1940 and 1943, drawing on his lectures on English economic history; it was published in New York in 1944, the same year as Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”. The book begins with the collapse of the nineteenth-century order – balance of power, gold standard, liberal state – and traces it back to the self-regulating market, whose creation in England since the late eighteenth century, from the Speenhamland system to the New Poor Law of 1834, it reconstructs. Treating labour, land and money as commodities, Polanyi argues, threatens to destroy society and nature; society responds with protective countermovements, and the deadlock between the two led to fascism. Long little read by economists, the book has been widely discussed again since the debates on globalisation and the financial crisis of 2008.
Connections
Taken up in
- The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism1990 · Gøsta Esping-Andersen
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