【博客搬家】写于2020年4月17日

Karl Paul Polanyi, born in October 25, 1886, was an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economical thought and for his book - 'The Great Transformation' - which argued that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was not inevitable but historically contingent. He is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economics are embedded in society and culture. This view ran counter to mainstream economics but is popular in anthropology, economic history, economic sociology and political science. (Source from Wiki)

Sources from WATSON and KUTTNER.

The book named 'The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time', wrote by Polanyi, celebrates its 76th anniversary this year. Polanyi, with no academic base, was already a blend of journalist and public intellectual, a major critic of the Austrian School of free-market economics and its cultish leaders, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Polanyi and Hayek would cross swords for four decades - Hayek becoming more influential as an icon of the free-market right but history increasingly vindicating Polanyi.

1944 is a pivotal year. Hayek published his book 'The Road to Serfdom' and John Maynard Keynes was in the midst of helping to establish the Bretton Woods system. Between the two of them, their economic theories and books helped shape the political and economic policies of the post-war period. However, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a call to find an alternative approach as neither Keynesian or Hayekian solution feel suitable for the post-crisis situation we find ourselves in. Thus, Polanyi's work may offer a solution, or at least a different perspective.

Looking backward from 1944 to the 18th century, Polanyi saw the catastrophe of the interwar period, the Great Depression, fascism, and World War II as the logical culmination of laissez-faire taken to an extreme. He wrote that: "The origins of the cataclysm lay in the Utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulation market system". Keynes, however, had linked the policy mistakes of the interwar period to fascism and a second war. No one had contacted the dots all the way back to the industrial revolution.

The more famous critic of capitalism is of course Karl Marx, who predicted its collapse from internal contradictions. But a century after Marx wrote, at the apex of post-WW II boom in both Europe and the US, a contented bourgeoisie was huge and growing. The proletariat enjoyed steady income gains. The political energy of aroused workers progressive parliamentary parties that built a welfare state, to housebreak but not supplant capitalism. Nations that celebrated Marx, meanwhile, were economic failures that repressed their working classes.

Half a century later, the world looks more Marxian, the middle class was beleaguered, and even elite professions were becoming proletarianized, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis. Yet Marx, for all of his stubbornly apt insights about capitalism, is an unreliable guide to its remediation. Polanyi, with the benefit of nearly a century's worth more evidence, has a surer sense of how markets interact with society. More humanist than materialist, Polanyi did not believed in iron laws. His hope was that democratic leaders might learn from history and not repeat the calamitous mistakes of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Polanyi lived long enough to see his wish fulfilled for a few decades. In hindsight, however, the brief period between the book's publication and Polanyi's demise is looking like a respite in the socially destructive tendencies of rampant markets. In seeking to understand the dynamics of our own time, we can do no better than to revisit Polanyi.

There is, for the 'double movement' of Polanyi, an ongoing political struggle between the 'dis-embedding' force of the free market and the 're-embedding' efforts of social protection. It is one very useful way of understanding the politics of modern capitalism. He also argues that the market society is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but is a political and social construct. Such an approach puts Polanyi outside the mainstream of political economic debates between Keynesian and Hayekian.

Indeed, Polanyi brought home to audience this very important point that markets are not self-sustaining and they are not inevitable. It is unhelpful to think about political economy in terms of a dichotomising opposition between the state on the one hand and the market on the other. The notion that these two are involved in some sort of tug of war where one wins and the other loses or one gains at the other's expense does not makes sense in a Polanyi framework."

Contrary to libertarian economists from Adam Smith to Hayek, Polanyi argued, there was nothing 'natural' about the free-market.Modern commercial society depended on 'deliberate State action' by and for elites. "Laissez-faire", he wrote, savoring the oxymoron, "was planned".

For three decades after 1944, the success of a social settlement between labor and capital in the UK, seemed to vindicate both Polanyi's critique and his hopes. But the compromise did not stick. The path of capitalism since the 1970s has repeated the 19th-century hegemony of the market and is beginning to resemble the darker history of the 1920s and 1930s.

Unlike Marx, Polnayi viewed the transformation of a more balanced commercial society into a market-dominated one as neither natural nor inevitable. For Polanyi, "the progress could only come through conscious human action based on moral principles". So, Polanyi rejected both Marxists and economic libertarians for their shared premise that the stat should or could wither away. Marxists assumed the stat would be redundant after the workers' revolution; Libertarians saw (and see) the state as interfering with the genius of the market. Polanyi embraced democratic politics, both as an end in itself and as the necessary precondition fro taming the economy. Despite his gloomy rendering of history, Polanyi remained an optimist.

Though slow to win recognition, The Great Transformation became a modern classic. After the neoliberal assault on the grand compromise of the late 1940s, Polanyi seemed not just president but prophetic, because he had a lot of title as mentioned above, in moral philosopher Albert Hirschman's metaphor, Polanyi could be a trespasser across academic disciplines. Though Polanyi is one of the most cited of social scientists, he is not widely read among economists. In the mainstream of the profession, nor do most economists today study the relationship of economics to politics and social history.

Like Hirschman and Joseph Schumpeter, Polanyi had relatively few graduate students, and there is no formal Polanyi "school". He is prized by social historians and economic sociologists, and his brand of inquiry fits squarely into the tradition of American institutional economics associated with John R. Commons and the great debunker of free-market cant, Thorstein Veblen. Since 1988, thanks to the efforts of his daughter Kari and her colleague Marguerite Mendell, there has been an active Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, which holds regular conferences.

Polanyi's discussion of the influence of ideas, likewise, is all too contemporary. In the 1920s, as in the 1830s, the intellectual dominance of free-market economists gave elites pseudo-scientific cover to purse brutal and perverse policies, with a studied myopia about real-world consequences. And in our own time, market fundamentalism is again the dominant ideology. The latest great transformation, from a balanced social market economy to a dictatorship of the invisible hand, has weakened the power of the polity to restore balance and undermined the confidence of the working and middle classes in the use of the democratic state to counter market excess.

One must hope, with the optimistic Polanyi, the capitalism can be fixed. Hence, we may further discuss the current hot topic in the economic - "information capitalism" and "surveillance capitalism (most around the book wrote by Zuboff)".