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This paper presents a memorial to the great Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi, with special emphasis on recent Japanese scholarship. To begin with, I affirm that for Polanyi “fictitious commodities” and “fictitious commodity markets" were key institutions of market society. Next I consider his assertion that the Poor Law controversy played a crucial role in introducing a competitive labor market into Britain from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century. Polanyi explained that during that period a “theory of self-responsibility for poverty and unemployment” emerged, as did the beginning of economic liberalism. Then I emphasize that in his thinking, the rise of fascism is related to the fatal errors of liberal economic policymaking. According to Polanyi, the austerity policies of economic liberalism, which subordinated people's interests to those of the financial sector and undermined efforts to maintain peace, had a destructive influence on the lives of the people living in deficit states and in the Western democracies. His analysis of economic liberalism and fascism remains useful for considering the emergence of bad populism' (which is antithetical to democracy and human freedom) in our own age. Finally, in this paper, I examine Polanyi's thoughts on human freedom