Karl Polanyi

Quotes

• “Both the personnel and the motives of this singular body invested it with a status the roots of which were securely grounded in the private sphere of strictly commercial interest.”
• “At the heart of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people.”
• “Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'.”
• “The Industrial Revolution was merely the beginning of a revolution as extreme and radical as ever inflamed the minds of sectarians, but the new creed was utterly materialistic and believed that all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities.”
• “The conclusion, though weird, is inevitable; nothing less will serve the purpose: obviously, the dislocation caused by such devices must disjoint man's relationships and threaten his natural habitat with annihilation.”
• “Market economy implies a self-regulating system of markets; in slightly more technical terms, it is an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices. Such a system capable of organizing the whole of economic life without outside help or interference would certainly deserve to be called self-regulating. These rough indications should suffice to show the entirely unprecedented nature of such a venture in the history of the race.”

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Key facts

Born

25 October 1886, Vienna , Austria-Hungary

Died

23 April 1964 (1964-04-23) (aged 77), Pickering, Ontario , Canada

Spouse

Ilona Duczynska ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1923 ) ​

Children

Kari Polanyi Levitt

Relatives

Michael Polanyi (brother) John Polanyi (nephew) Eva Zeisel (niece)

Influences

Robert Owen , Bronisław Malinowski , G. D. H. Cole , Richard Tawney , Richard Thurnwald , Karl Marx , Aristotle , Karl Bücher , Heinrich Schurtz , Ferdinand Tönnies , Adam Smith , Alfred Radcliffe-Brown , Werner Sombart , Max Weber , György Lukács , Carl Menger

Discipline

Economic sociology , economic history , economic anthropology , Philosophy

School or tradition

Historical school of economics

Notable ideas

Embeddedness , Double Movement , fictitious commodities , economistic fallacy , the formalist–substantivist debate ( substantivism )

Influenced

Fred L. Block , Margaret Somers , Kari Polanyi Levitt

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image

Polányi Károly.jpg

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