At a recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was
reported that a ghost was haunting the deliberations of the assembled
global elite - that of the renowned social scientist and economic
historian, Karl Polanyi.
In his classic work, The Great Transformation, Polanyi documented the
impact of the rise of market society on western civilization and
captured better than anyone else the destructive effects of the
economic, political and social crisis of the 1930s. Today, in the throes
of another Great Recession, Polanyi's work has gained a new
significance. To understand the profound challenges faced by our
democracies today, we need to revisit history and revisit his work.
In this new collection of unpublished texts - lectures, draft essays and
reports written between 1919 and 1958 - Polanyi examines the collapse of
the liberal economic order and the demise of democracies in the
inter-war years. He takes up again the fundamental question that
preoccupied him throughout his work - the place of the economy in
society - and aims to show how we might return to an economy anchored in
society and its cultural, religious and political institutions.
For anyone concerned about the danger to democracy and social life posed
by the unleashing of capital from regulatory control and the dominance
of the neoliberal ideologies of market fundamentalism, this important
new volume by one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century is a
must-read.
