Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, and Contemporary Capitalism

Excerpt

Seventy-five years ago, in April 1944, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation—On the origins of our times (TGT) was published in the United States and England. Since then it has been translated into 15 languages (cf. Polanyi Levitt in this volume). Written in America during the war and under the impact of the Great Depression, TGT sought to come to terms with the collapse of the liberal civilization in a similarly embracing manner as Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectics of enlightenment, published as a preliminary version also in 1944 in the USA. TGT captures the specific historical constellation of the “revolutionary thirties” in which free trade, the gold standard, and liberal democracy reached an impasse, resulting in competing attempts to re-order society—attempts that ranged from socialism to fascism and from Stalin’s “socialism in one country” to Roosevelt’s New Deal. At that time, the repercussions of Polanyi’s work remained fairly restricted, John Dewey’s euphoric feedback being a notable exception (cf. Gräser in this volume). …