Karl Polanyi 1886 – 1964

Karl Polanyi was a Hungarian-American economic historian, social theorist, and political philosopher. After service in the Austro-Hungarian army and a period of activism in Vienna, he emigrated to England and then to the United States, where he taught at Bennington and Columbia. His Great Transformation argued that the self-regulating market is not a natural human institution but a deliberate construction whose costs to human society generate a double movement of resistance and re-embedding. His comparative work on archaic economies, in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, helped to inaugurate substantivist economic anthropology.

Karl Polanyi was born in 1886 in Vienna and grew up in Budapest, the son of a railway entrepreneur of Jewish Hungarian background; his brother Michael Polanyi became a philosopher of science. He took degrees in law and philosophy at Budapest, served as a cavalry officer in the Habsburg army during the First World War, and helped found the radical Galilei Circle of secular Hungarian intellectuals.

After exile from the conservative regime of Horthy he worked from 1924 in Vienna as economic editor of the Oesterreichischer Volkswirt, fled Austria in 1933 for England, and from 1947 to 1953 taught economic history at Columbia University. His major work The Great Transformation (1944) was succeeded by the comparative volumes Trade and Market in the Early Empires (1957) and the posthumous Dahomey and the Slave Trade and Livelihood of Man, in which his colleagues drew together his economic-anthropological essays.

Polanyi argued that the self-regulating market of nineteenth-century liberalism was a historically aberrant institution whose disembedding of economy from society generated the catastrophic 'double movement' of fascism and the welfare state, and that pre-modern and non-Western economies had been organized around reciprocity and redistribution. The Great Transformation has become a foundational text for economic sociology, the history of capitalism, and recent critiques of neoliberalism. He died at Pickering, Ontario in 1964.