Quotes from Karl Polanyi

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment....would result in the demolition of society.

As such dissatisfactions intensify, social order becomes more problematic and the danger increases that political leaders will seek to divert discontent by scapegoating internal or external enemies. This is how the utopian vision of neoliberals leads not to peace but to intensified conflict.

For Polanyi the deepest flaw in market liberalism is that it subordinates human purposes to the logic of an impersonal market mechanism.

The congenital weakness of nineteenth century society was not that it was industrial but that it was a market society. Industrial civilization will continue to exist when the Utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory.

And yet, Burke might have countered, once the masses were fated by the laws of political economy to toil in misery, what else was the idea of equality but a cruel bait to goad mankind into self-destruction?

growth may lead to an increase in poverty.

But we also know that growth can bring enormous benefits to most segments in society, as it has in some of the more enlightened advanced industrial countries.

This leads up to our thesis which still remains to be proven: that the origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.

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 surroundings into a wilderness.

the organization of labor is only another word for the forms of life of the common people, this means that the development of the market system would be accompanied by a change in the organization of society itself. All along the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic system.

the selfish gladly consoled themselves with the thought that though it was merciful at least it was not liberal;

In the half-century 1879–1929, Western societies developed into close-knit units, in which powerful disruptive strains were latent. The more immediate source of this development was the impaired self-regulation of market economy. Since society was made to conform to the needs of the market mechanism, imperfections in the functioning of that mechanism created cumulative strains in the body social. Impaired self-regulation was an effect of protectionism.

Robert Owen's was a true insight: market economy if left to evolve according to its own laws would create great and permanent evils.

Poverty was nature surviving in society; that the limitedness of food and the unlimitedness of men had come to an issue just when the promise of boundless increase of wealth burst in upon us made the irony only the more bitter.

Yet the victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the liberals' obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control.

The most recent global financial crisis reminded the current generation of the lessons that their grandparents had learned in the Great Depression: the self-regulating economy does not always work as well as its proponents would like us to believe.

the IMF, those institutional bastions of belief in the free market system, believe that governments should not intervene in the exchange rate

they have never presented a coherent and compelling explanation of why this market should be treated differently from other markets.

We can know more than we can tell.

The habit of looking at the last ten thousand years as well as at the array of early societies as a mere prelude to the true history of our civilization which started approximately with the publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, is, to say the least, out of date.

one of the book's enduring contributions—its focus on the institutions that regulate the global economy—was directly linked to Polanyi's multiple exiles. His moves from Budapest to Vienna to England and then to the United States, combined with a deep sense of moral responsibility, made Polanyi a kind of world citizen.

the role of managing fictitious commodities places the state inside three of the most important markets; it becomes utterly impossible to sustain market liberalism's view that the state is "outside" of the economy.

In Polanyi's view the fascist impulse—to protect society from the market by sacrificing human freedom—was universal, but local contingencies determined where fascist regimes were successful in taking power.

Workers, farmers, and small business people will not tolerate for any length of time a pattern of economic organization in which they are subject to periodic dramatic fluctuations in their daily economic circumstances.