The Great Transformation Analysis

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The Great Transformation, although not a recently published piece, still presents many values and truths that still hold water today. Polanyi’s piece has held up very well over time, giving the reader a very profound understanding of the issues facing global societies at the dawn of the 21st century. I believe the author is trying to describe to the readers his view on the importance of self-regulating markets and the role they played on global economies (Polanyi pg. 3). Polanyi further adds to that statement by providing his thesis to this paper on pages 3-4, Polanyi states that:
“Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surrounding into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it.” (Polanyi pg 3-4)
The purpose of the remainder of his book is to try and answer that proposed thesis, the importance being that Polanyi believes that markets are not a natural feature in human society, he points out that nearly all other societies used different, non-market instruments to deliver goods. I believe this is important because at the time of his writing, Polanyi’s views went against the grain, which I believe plays a strong part if why this book has stayed popular throughout the years.
To summari...

... middle of paper ...

...red today as the creator of substantivism, which incorporates his embeddedness views of economies into society and culture.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this piece by Karl Polanyi. Although it is not my favorite book to have read or summarized thus far (the Gladwell book was my favorite so far), I found in intelligent and interesting. It was also quite thought-provoking for me as most of my studies and teaching s have been traditional economics. I had never really read anything else that proposed the critique of the self-regulating market theory like Polanyi does in this piece. I think it is even more profound when thought of in the context of the time in which this was written. As previously stated, this was written in the early 1940’s, right in the middle of WWII and all the upheaval that war brought to the globe and makes it even more a substantial economic piece.

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