Hungarian-born economic historian and political economist whose The Great Transformation (1944) is one of the 20th century's most arresting accounts of where modern capitalism came from and what it cost. Polanyi wrote the book in wartime exile, looking back at the collapse of the 19th-century liberal order into fascism, war, and depression, and asking: what happened?
His answer overturns a story liberals tell themselves. The self-regulating market, he argued, is not the natural human default but a 19th-century invention — a political project imposed in Britain between roughly 1834 (new Poor Laws) and 1870 (gold standard consolidation). All previous societies had embedded economic life within social relations; the great move of modern liberalism was to disembed it, treating land, labor, and money as though they were ordinary commodities when they are nothing of the kind. Labor is people; land is nature; money is a social convention. Treating them as commodities for sale exposes society to forces that will tear it apart if not constrained — and in fact produces a "double movement" of spontaneous self-defense: factory acts, trade unions, welfare measures, protectionism, eventually nationalism and fascism when the liberal order cannot accommodate reform. The collapse of the 1930s was the predictable endpoint of this movement.
Polanyi's anthropological work (with assistants including his daughter, the economist Kari Polanyi Levitt) extended the argument, showing that in most human societies economic activity has been organized through reciprocity, redistribution, or householding rather than market exchange. The rediscovery of Polanyi since the 1990s has given contemporary critics of Neoliberalism one of their most powerful analytical tools.