Karl Polanyi

Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) was born in Vienna, raised in Budapest and trained in law. He worked as an economic journalist in Vienna before the rise of fascism led him to Britain in 1933. There he taught social and economic history through the Workers’ Educational Association. He later held posts at Bennington College and Columbia University.

His writing crosses economic history, political economy and anthropology. Polanyi challenged the idea that markets arise naturally and operate apart from society. Instead, he argued that economic life is organized through social institutions, political choices and communal obligations. His prose joins broad historical argument with close attention to labor, land, money and the human costs of rapid change.

The Great Transformation, written while he was at Bennington and published in 1944, is his defining work. It traces the rise of industrial capitalism and the self-regulating market, especially through nineteenth-century Britain. His later research in economic history and anthropology contributed to Trade and Market in the Early Empires, published in 1957 with other scholars.

Begin with The Great Transformation. It introduces Polanyi’s central arguments and shows how his historical method works across economics, politics and social life. The book is demanding but direct, and it remains the clearest route into the questions that shaped his career: what happens when markets are treated as independent forces, and how societies respond to the disruption that follows.