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mburnamfink 's review for:
Karl Polanyi sadly passed away before his writing could find its natural format, a 100+ tweet thread beginning with "It's Time For Some Game Theory..."
This book is nominally an account of the development of laissez faire capitalism, and a rebuttal to the arguments of Ludwig Von Mises that free markets naturally develop in the absence of political intervention, with a kicker about capitalism's responsibility for the rise of fascism (the book was published in 1944).
What this book is is a rambling series of vaguely linked essays and tangents, with a few sparkling epigrams buried in a mass of economical-historical mush. Polanyi is vague about his timeline, switching the exact period under study repeatedly through the book, which hinders comparisons of pre-transformation 18th century England with various policy innovations in the 19th century, and mature capitalism in the 20th. The thread, as much as I can follow it, is that pre-modern people always distinguished between domestic production, which was limited by traditional feudal and guild structures to protect livelihoods, and production for foreign trade, which was used to exploit any community foolish enough to let it in. Through the 19th century, Britain enacted a series of reforms that destroyed the old order, ushering in a period of dramatic capitalist growth based on promises of profit for the bourgeois, and the lash of hunger to motivate workers.
More broadly, classical liberalism can never work, because three key commodities: land, labor, and money, are "fictitious", and under pure free market influences immediately collapse into some sort of disastrous singularity. Labor is human life, land is nature, the gold standard a false idol, and these things must be protected from society and vice versa. As evidence for this, Polanyi puts forth the masses of regulatory laws that followed laissez-fair reforms. Even in the absence of a program, Chartist or Marxist in ideology, people instinctively realized that market logic was corrosive, and restricted pure market functioning. Liberty is built on society, and society is a matter of submitting to limits.
I'm intensely frustrated. I mostly agree with Polanyi politically, but he connects evidence to argument in a way that feels entirely opaque. This may be a foundational work in economic history, but it reads with all the relevance of last centuries flamewars. The basic dyad of the debate between capital and society remains, but the contours and points of argument have shifted so rapidly this book feel archaic.
This book is nominally an account of the development of laissez faire capitalism, and a rebuttal to the arguments of Ludwig Von Mises that free markets naturally develop in the absence of political intervention, with a kicker about capitalism's responsibility for the rise of fascism (the book was published in 1944).
What this book is is a rambling series of vaguely linked essays and tangents, with a few sparkling epigrams buried in a mass of economical-historical mush. Polanyi is vague about his timeline, switching the exact period under study repeatedly through the book, which hinders comparisons of pre-transformation 18th century England with various policy innovations in the 19th century, and mature capitalism in the 20th. The thread, as much as I can follow it, is that pre-modern people always distinguished between domestic production, which was limited by traditional feudal and guild structures to protect livelihoods, and production for foreign trade, which was used to exploit any community foolish enough to let it in. Through the 19th century, Britain enacted a series of reforms that destroyed the old order, ushering in a period of dramatic capitalist growth based on promises of profit for the bourgeois, and the lash of hunger to motivate workers.
More broadly, classical liberalism can never work, because three key commodities: land, labor, and money, are "fictitious", and under pure free market influences immediately collapse into some sort of disastrous singularity. Labor is human life, land is nature, the gold standard a false idol, and these things must be protected from society and vice versa. As evidence for this, Polanyi puts forth the masses of regulatory laws that followed laissez-fair reforms. Even in the absence of a program, Chartist or Marxist in ideology, people instinctively realized that market logic was corrosive, and restricted pure market functioning. Liberty is built on society, and society is a matter of submitting to limits.
I'm intensely frustrated. I mostly agree with Polanyi politically, but he connects evidence to argument in a way that feels entirely opaque. This may be a foundational work in economic history, but it reads with all the relevance of last centuries flamewars. The basic dyad of the debate between capital and society remains, but the contours and points of argument have shifted so rapidly this book feel archaic.