Reading The Great Transformation

Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation is a classic... it has come to be recognized as a founding charter for economic sociology. It anticipated major accomplishments of late-twentieth-century social science (including, among others, Ben Bernanke’s studies of the Great Depression and Amartya Sen’s work on famine). Its core problems—how do societies respond to globalization? how do they address the risks of market failure?—are central to contemporary macrosociology. It is probably time to recognize the canonical status of this book and put it on the classical theory syllabus alongside Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. But The Great Transformation is also—can we admit this about our classics?—a mess. It is conceptually sloppy. Some key terms (such as “market society” and “social dislocation”) are never explicitly defined. Others (such as “a ‘movement’”) are defined with pedantic care, and then used willy-nilly, as if Polanyi forgot what he said the words meant. Important steps in the argument assume what is to be proven. Inconsistencies abound. The treatment of historical sources is casual. To round it all off, the book concludes with a breathtakingly wrong prediction: namely, that the era of market liberalism is over for good—as of 1944. To salvage a theory from all this, let alone one that we can apply to societies in the present day, surely requires a heroic effort of interpretation. Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers undertake the salvage effort...