Environment and Planning A 2013, volume 45, pages 1662 – 1670
doi:10.1068/a45583
Commentary
The two Karls, or reflections on Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation This reflection on Karl Polanyi’s masterwork, The Great Transformation (1944), comes in response to a request by Jamie Peck to join a session on Polanyi at the gathering of the Association of American Geographers in 2012. I was initially doubtful about speaking on Polanyi, since I had not reopened the book since graduate school some forty years ago; my copy dated 1971, the year I started doctoral work, is even more weather beaten than I am.(1) Scary to think that I entered graduate student that long ago, but good to know that I got off on the right foot by reading the likes of Polanyi at the outset. I have never forgotten The Great Transformation, despite the passing years and shifting intellectual interests. Picking it up again was like meeting an old friend, and well repaid a new visit. The book is, without question, a wonderful read. It is grand history at its best, with sweeping vistas across Europe; Polanyi is nothing if not an authoritative author, one who conjures up comparisons with Fernand Braudel. His writing is full of polemical force, with a biting social and economic criticism of capitalism, and The Great Transformation is a profoundly radical work—though carefully posed to make it palatable to an Anglo-American audience allergic to Marxist and communist ideas. Polanyi’s purpose in writing The Great Transformation in the midst of the Second World War was to explain the rise of fascism, socialism, and the New Deal in the mid-20th century. To do so he had to account for the seemingly total failure of capitalism in his time, with two world wars and a Great Depression. This he does by attributing the crisis to the absolute capitalism of the century between 1830 and 1930, in which the self-regulating market system took full command of European society. The bookends of his historical account are the social calamity of the Industrial Revolution and the economic and military calamity of the early 20th century. The key to these disastrous events is the dramatic unleashing of the market by the liberal states of the 19th century, following the misguided ideas of the economists of the Industrial Revolution era. Conversely, the way out of the century-long disaster, for Polanyi, was through national policies that turned away from the failed dream of the absolute market. The Great Transformation is not the transition to capitalism, as one might expect, but the transition out of 19th-century liberal capitalism—an epoch being brought to a close by the troika of socialism (page 234), fascism (page 237), and the New Deal (page 202) in the interwar era (page 229). Or, as Polanyi puts it: “In retrospect our age will be credited with having seen the end of the self-regulating market” (page 142). This is a grand vision and one that we can identify with today, given the onslaught of neoliberalism against the Welfare State brought into being in Polanyi’s time by the combination of social democracy and the New Deal.(2) No wonder Polanyi has enjoyed a revival in the last several years.(3) Nevertheless, I am less enamored of Polanyi than many on the left and I think we need to look at The Great Transformation in a more critical fashion. For my own part, I have traveled a long road intellectually from that initial encounter with Polanyi in 1971, (1)
All page references below are to this 1957 paperback edition. On the neoliberal revolution/reaction, see Harvey (2005). (3) See, for example, Fred Block's introduction to the 2001 Beacon Press edition of The Great Transformation (Block, 2001). (2)