Karl Polanyi and The Great Transformation
From the perspective of 2026, the future looks grim. Climate change, economic stagnation, political dysfunction, and unchecked violence suggests a future in which the global political-economic order we have lived under for our entire lives will collapse. But we have been here before. Writing amidst the cataclysm of World War II, Karl Polanyi experienced the end of the world as he had known it, tracing the causes of its demise so that the world that succeeded his own might avoid similar disasters.
This seminar is a close reading of Polanyi’s 1944 classic The Great Transformation, an iconoclastic work combining history, economics, and radical politics to analyze the organizing principle of capitalist society — the self-regulating market. Polanyi reimagines the causes and consequences of free market liberalism, outlining a “double movement” of capitalist expansion and popular resistance that revolutionized social hierarchies and created the structural conditions for market society’s spectacular collapse into world war and global depression.
His strikingly original analysis sheds new light on liberalism, socialism, and fascism — the same protean ideologies that haunt our own times. We will give particular attention to the tools Polanyi offers us to grapple with the rise and fall of modern neoliberalism and the political pathologies that emerged from its fall.
Along with the primary text, we will read associated essays by Polanyi and his most prominent critics and successors, placing The Great Transformation in a rich historical context that speaks to the crises of our own moment. We will read Polanyi alongside Friedrich Hayek and Hannah Arendt, two crucial interlocutors who were also obsessed by the destruction of their shared civilization. We will also sample some of the best contemporary Polanyian scholarship from Fred Block, Gareth Dale, Ira Katznelson, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, Margaret Somers, and more.
