The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Karl Polanyi. 1944.
In 1944, the opposing monumental classics, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek and The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi, were published. From the right, Hayek argued that market liberalism led to prosperity, political liberty, and prevention of authoritarian governance. From the left, Polanyi argued that the rise of market liberalism during the industrial revolution led to intolerable hardship, inevitable unsustainable countermeasures, and finally collapse into fascism, the Great Depression, and World Wars I and II.
Since their publication during World War II, these markedly opposed ideas have now been tested by seventy years of history. For the first thirty years after the war, policies reflecting Polanyi’s ideas led to a mixed economy of government policies and regulated markets in the US, northern Europe, and elsewhere that produced robustly increased prosperity broadly shared at all income levels. For the next forty years, ascendency of Hayek’s ideas led to reduction of the role of government with attendant economic instability, rising inequality (with all economic gains going to the rich in the US), and coercive imposition of market liberalism by authoritarian governments with disastrous results throughout Latin America and the former Soviet Union. Given the adverse consequences of resurgent market liberalism, the rebuttal of its ideas in The Great Transformation is as important today as ever.
In The Great Transformation, Polanyi maintains that before the industrial revolution, markets did not play an important role in human society—they were embedded in society rather than the other way around. Goods and services were generally distributed without the motive for profit by the non-market mechanisms of reciprocity according to social relations, centralized storage with redistribution, and production for one’s own use known as householding. When present, the role of markets was peripheral and subordinate to politics, religion, and social relations.
The industrial revolution brought about an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production accompanied by catastrophic dislocations of the lives of the common people, of which poverty was merely the economic aspect. During this time, English thinkers created the theory of market liberalism, which radically reversed the previous subordination of markets to society by removing the role for government so that society was instead subordinated to self-regulating markets (without government interference).
This change required that human labor, nature, and money be turned into commodities that could be bought and sold without regard to human and social considerations. Efficient functioning of markets also required callous indifference to the social dislocation, poverty, and damage to nature that resulted and even to hunger as a motivating factor for the working class. This change from regulated to self-regulating markets that organized the whole of society on the principle of gain and profit marked a great transformation of the nature of society by the removal of democratic control of markets.
The goals of this transformation were unrealistically utopian and could never be achieved without annihilating the human and natural substance of society. Even during its installation, laissez-faire proved to be a myth. Government action was mandatory to adjust the supply of money and credit, to enforce provisions for labor and land, and to prevent political disruption. Even with this level of government activity, market liberalism still imposed unsustainable hardships on ordinary people from speculative excess, growing inequality, competition from imports, depressions, unemployment, poverty, and reduced entitlement to assistance.
By the late 1800s, these impossible pressures of the self-regulating market necessarily led to a countermovement in industrialized nations to protect their societies from the market. This countermovement included protectionism for national markets and competition for colonies to take resources from other societies. In exotic and colonial regions with the absence of protective measures unspeakable suffering resulted. Thus Polanyi characterizes market societies as having two opposing movements, referred to as a “double movement.” These two contradictory movements resulted in simultaneous struggles to expand the scope of the market because of the opportunities for some and to limit the scope of the market because of the adverse consequences for many.
These internal contradictions led to disruptive stresses and strains that were unsustainable for market societies. In the domestic economy, class conflict resulted from issues like the choice between inflation for stability of workers incomes and employment and deflation for stability of currency for investors. Market liberals from Spencer to Mises held that popular democracy was a danger to capitalism and that workers should not have the right to vote. In the international economy, relentless shocks imposed by the gold standard forced nations to consolidate around heightened national and imperial boundaries. In international politics, intensified political, military, and economic rivalries finally culminated in World War I.
By this time, the class struggle over market liberalism was at an impasse. For a critical decade, economic liberals supported authoritarian intervention in service of their deflationary policy to protect currency exchange and investment. This merely weakened the democratic forces that might otherwise have averted the fascist catastrophe. During the Great Depression, the gold standard finally collapsed, foreign debts were repudiated, capital markets and world trade dwindled away, and the global political and economic system disintegrated. In a second great transformation of society that followed, the replacements of market society by fascism, socialism, and the New Deal were similar only in discarding laissez-faire principles. The conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life had ultimately destroyed society. World Wars I and II merely hastened its destruction.
In 1944, Polanyi appears to have regarded the utopia of market liberalism as utterly discredited. He expressed the hope that the passing of market economy could become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom. He noted that freedom as the absence of power and compulsion as claimed by market liberals is not possible in a complex society. The function of power is to ensure the measure of conformity which is needed for the survival of the group: its ultimate source is opinion.
Regulation both extends and restricts freedom; only the balance of freedoms lost and won is significant. The comfortable classes enjoy the freedom provided by leisure in security. They resent the suggestion to spread out income, leisure, and security to extend to others the freedom they enjoy. Obviously, those who lack security cannot enjoy the same freedom as the comfortable classes. Those who want more freedom for all need not fear that either power or planning will undermine their freedom. Regulation and control in a complex society strive to give us all the security we need to achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all.
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Top reviews from other countries
Hunor Peter
A very interesting book on the birth of market capitalism
Reviewed in the Netherlands on June 28, 2023
