Priznam, tudi sam sem Karla Polanyja in njegovo epohalno knjigo “The Great Transformation” bral šele lani. Mnogo prepozno. Tukaj je kratek povzetek njegovih ključnih ugotovitev, kot jih vidi Robert Kuttner:

In November 1933, less than a year after Hitler assumed power in Berlin, a 47-year-old socialist writer on Vienna’s leading economics weekly was advised by his publisher that it was too risky to keep him on the staff. It would be best both for the Österreichische Volkswirt and his own safety if Karl Polanyi left the magazine. Thus began a circuitous odyssey via London, Oxford, and Bennington, Vermont, that led to the publication in 1944 of what many consider the 20th century’s most prophetic work of political economy, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Polanyi, with no academic base, was already a blend of journalist and public intellectual, a major critic of the Austrian School of free-market economics and its cultish leaders, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Polanyi and Hayek would cross swords for four decades—Hayek becoming more influential as an icon of the free-market right but history increasingly vindicating Polanyi.

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Looking backward from 1944 to the 18th century, Polanyi saw the catastrophe of the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of laissez-faire taken to an extreme. “The origins of the cataclysm,” he wrote, “lay in the Utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” Others, such as John Maynard Keynes, had linked the policy mistakes of the interwar period to fascism and a second war. No one had connected the dots all the way back to the industrial revolution.

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Contrary to libertarian economists from Adam Smith to Hayek, Polanyi argued, there was nothing “natural” about the free market. Primitive economies were built on social obligations. Modern commercial society depended on “deliberate State action” by and for elites. “Laissez-faire” he writes, savoring the oxymoron, “was planned.”

Libertarian economists, who treat the market as universal—disengaged from local cultures and historic time—are fanatics whose ideas end in tragedy. Their prescription means “no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”

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The old poor laws were abolished in 1834 in favor of the poorhouse, an institution designed to be so degrading that workers would accept the dismal labor-market wages in William Blake’s dark, satanic mills. Meanwhile, free trade became the norm, meaning lower grain prices in the short run (and depressed wages) but increased volatility in the price of food. In the same period, the rise of a rigidly enforced gold standard limited the state’s ability to temper periodic downturns.

An economy oblivious to social consequences had to engender backlash. The sponsors of protective measures were often conservatives concerned about social stability, such as the English Tory Benjamin Disraeli and the Prussian Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. “The [English] Ten Hours Bill of 1847,” Polanyi writes, “which Karl Marx hailed as the first victory of socialism, was the work of enlightened reactionaries.” But by the late 19th century, periodic financial panics and depressions menaced both society and the market system. This got displaced into nationalism, culminating in World War I.

After that war, the victorious nations tried to restore the trinity of free trade, the gold standard, and unprotected labor markets. Obsessed with sound currency, market ideologues and bankers demanded austerity policies leading to both mass unemployment and episodes of hyperinflation. Given the legacy of war debts and dislocations, all this was more than the economy or society could bear. Market institutions, Polanyi writes, “broke down in the twenties everywhere—in Germany, Italy, or Austria, the event was merely more political and more dramatic.”

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To provide a counterweight to neoliberal dystopia, Polanyi believed the working class needed to be mobilized politically, in a robust democracy. He arrived at this conclusion not merely from theory but from his worker-education efforts at the Galilei Circle and by living in one of the most successful social-democratic epochs of the European experience, Red Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s—red as in social-democratic, not communist. There, after World War I, socialist municipal governments in power for 15 years built model low-rent housing financed by taxation. Parents received kindergartens, day care, and a family allowance in the form of a “clothes package.” Gas, water, and electricity were provided by publicly owned utilities. Taxes on the wealthy included surcharges on the use of servants. Generous unemployment insurance strengthened workers’ bargaining power.

Polanyi viewed Red Vienna as a hopeful counterpoint to the Dickensian poorhouse on one extreme and fascism on the other. …

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Fortunately, a good deal on the connection between Polanyi’s life and his work has already been written by his daughter and literary executor, Kari Polanyi Levitt, an emerita professor at McGill University in Montreal. In Polanyi Levitt’s most recent book, From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization, she provides fascinating new material on Polanyi’s debate with Mises and Hayek. From the time he worked at the Österreichische Volkswirt in the mid-1920s, Polanyi engaged Mises and Hayek both ideologically and technically, arguing over pricing mechanisms under democratic socialism and the emergent dangers of the libertarian system then strangling Europe’s postwar recovery. Polanyi viewed Mises and Hayek as modern counterparts of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, punishers of the poor in the name of market incentives.

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Though slow to win recognition, The Great Transformation became a modern classic. After the neoliberal assault on the grand compromise of the late 1940s, Polanyi seemed not just prescient but prophetic. Because he was a political organizer, journalist, self-taught historian, and economist, Polanyi, in moral philosopher Albert Hirschman’s metaphor, could be a trespasser across academic disciplines. Though Polanyi is one of the most cited of social scientists, he is not widely read among economists. The mainstream of the profession has largely stopped teaching the history of economic ideas. Nor do most economists today study the relationship of economics to politics and social history.

Vir: Robert Kuttner,The American Prospect