Born 1886

Karl Polanyi relativized market economics within human history, demonstrating how the self-regulating market was historically exceptional and socially destructive. The Great Transformation remains a classic of economic history, economic sociology, and political economy.

Born 1886 in Vienna to a wealthy Hungarian Jewish family. Polanyi studied law at Budapest, then served as a cavalry officer in WWI.

In postwar Vienna he worked as a journalist. He engaged with Austrian economists but formed views opposing Mises's free-market absolutism. Fleeing Nazism in 1933, he settled in England, teaching adult education at Oxford while developing The Great Transformation.

Published 1944, the book analyzed the rise and collapse of nineteenth-century liberal market society. His central argument: in traditional societies, economic activity was always embedded in social relations, religion, and politics. The nineteenth century first attempted to disembed the economy as an autonomous sphere. This disembedding inevitably destroyed social fabric, provoking society's self-defense through state intervention, labor legislation, and social insurance. This double movement between market expansion and social protection drove modern history.

Polanyi called land, labor, and money fictitious commodities: not produced for sale, yet treated as commodities by market society. This fiction causes environmental destruction, labor exploitation, and financial crises.

From 1947 he taught at Columbia, turning to economic anthropology. He analyzed reciprocity, redistribution, and householding as integration forms in pre-modern economies, demonstrating empirically that market exchange is not the sole economic form. He died 1964 in Pickering, Canada, aged seventy-seven.