The Great Retransformation
Karl Polanyi predicted that markets left to themselves would eventually tear society apart. Eighty years on, his warning looks more urgent than ever. There is a book that keeps resurfacing at moments of political upheaval. It was written in New York, by a Hungarian émigré, in the final years of the Second World War. It has no single villain and offers no easy remedy. And yet, decade after decade — after the oil shocks of the 1970s, after the financial crisis of 2008, and now in the age of Brexit and Trump and surging populisms of every stripe — readers keep returning to it, because it seems to describe not just the past but the present. That book is The Great Transformation , published in 1944 by Karl Polanyi. Its central argument is deceptively simple: the self-regulating market is not a natural or inevitable human institution. It was a historically specific, deliberately constructed phenomenon — and a deeply disruptive one. To understand why that m...