Karl Polanyi: “The market mechanism moreover created the delusion of economic determinism as a general law for all human society.. To attempt to apply economic determinism to all human societies is little short of fantastic. Nothing is more obvious to the student of social anthropology than the variety of institutions found to be compatible with practically identical instruments of production. Only since the market was permitted to grind the human fabric into the featureless uniformity of selenic erosion has man’s institutional creativeness been in abeyance.”
Karl Polanyi considers this article to represent his first significant advance over the thesis presented in The Great Transformation, which attracted international attention as an original analysis of the dilemma of free enterprise capitalism as it affects our entire Western society. Dr Polanyi was born in Vienna in 1886, and was from 1924 to 1934 on the staff of the Oesterreichische Volkswirt, a leading financial weekly. When the clerical dictatorship was established, he emigrated to England, where he lectured at Oxford and the University of London, co-edited Christianity and Social Revolution, and wrote The Essence of Fascism. He was at Bennington College from 1940 to 1943, and will return to the United States this month as visiting professor at Columbia University. This article is twelfth in the series, “The Crisis of the Individual“.
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