Karl Polanyi Quotes on Politics
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) gave twentieth-century political-economic philosophy its most influential historical analysis of the rise and fall of the self-regulating market system as a political project. The central thesis is that the apparently natural market economy of the long nineteenth century was in fact the product of a sustained political effort to disembed the economy from the social-political relations in which all prior human economies had been embedded — and that the resulting commodification of land, labor, and money produced the protective counter-movements (factory legislation, social insurance, agrarian protection, eventually fascism and socialism) whose competing trajectories shaped the political conflicts of the twentieth century. The framework, drawing on the Austro-Hungarian intellectual tradition and Polanyi’s exile from the rising Nazi threat in his native Vienna, shaped subsequent economic anthropology through Marshall Sahlins and the broader contemporary debate over the political constitution of capitalism.
Quotes
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“The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.”
Ch. 12 : Birth of the Liberal Creed -
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.”
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“Ch. 1 : The Hundred Years' Peace”
Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was the self-regulating market which produced an unheard-of material welfare. Th -
“Ch. 1 : The Hundred Years' Peace”
Both the personnel and the motives of this singular body invested it with a status the roots of which were securely grounded in the private sphere of strictly commercial interest. -
“The true nature of the international system under which we were living was not realized until it failed. Hardly anyone understood the political function of the international monetary system; the awful suddenness of the transformation thus took the world completely by surprise. And yet the gold standard was the only remaining pillar of the traditional world economy; when it broke, the effect was bound to be instantaneous. To liberal economists the gold standard was a purely economic institution; they refused even to consider it as a part of a social mechanism.”
Ch. 2 : Conservative Twenties, Revolutionary Thirties