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.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Hungarian-American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Karl Polanyi:
“The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.”
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Attributed to Karl Polanyi:
“Society is the way human beings hold together.”
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Attributed to Karl Polanyi:
“Labor, land, and money are essentially fictitious commodities.”
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Attributed to Karl Polanyi:
“The market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government.”
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Attributed to Karl Polanyi:
“Power and economic value are a paradigm of social reality.”