Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation.

POLANYI, Karl.

Item Number: 117688

London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1945.

First edition of Polanyi’s landmark work. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in the rare original dust jacket with light rubbing, small name to the front free endpaper. An exceptional example.

One of the great works of twentieth century economics and surely one of greatest critiques of market liberalism. As an émigré fleeing Nazism, Polanyi witnessed a world falling apart as global depression, fascist regimes, and resurgent racism metastasized into worldwide terror. Finding intellectual sanctuary at Bennington College, Polanyi worked out a bold diagnosis of what had gone wrong in The Great Transformation, and of how modern society might be rebuilt upon a more equitable foundation. A study of the origins of the Industrial Revolution and the enormity of its economic consequences, ?it argues a triple thesis: (i) that in Great Britain and Western Europe, the coming of machine technology to mercantilistic national economies that contained governmentally regulated markets induced enormous growth in all input and output markets and the removal of governmental controls from some of them; (ii) that nationally integrated market systems in which labour, land, and money as well as produced goods were transacted as market commodities were historically unique; (iii) although machine technology producing within a market system was enormously productive its destructive consequences culminating in the Great Depression of the 1930s, forced governments from the early 19th century onwards to initiate market controls, monetary and fiscal policy to mitigate its destructive consequences, what we now call 'managed' and 'welfare state capitalism'? (New Palgrave). Polanyi's approach to understanding the relationship between politics and the economy has proven influential in the development of numerous fields of study, including economic history, economic sociology, economic anthropology, and historical sociology.