The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market, State and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century

The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, written in 1944, is a twentieth-century classic. It presents a passionate critique of the inhumanity of liberal capitalism, an inhumanity which, Polanyi thought, could never be repeated. The social and political institutions developed in the post-War period not only protected society from the cruelty of the self-regulating market, but were essential to enable the market itself to function. The history of the market, Polanyi tells us, is a history of regulation.